This is the pre-publication version of: Chapter 9, “The ins and outs of the Chrysostom letter- collection: New ways of looking at a limited corpus”, in B. Neil and P. Allen (eds), Collecting Early Christian Letters: From the Apostle Paul to Late Antiquity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, 129-153. All citations should reference the published version. The ins and outs of the Chrysostom letter collection: New ways of looking at a limited corpus Wendy Mayer Within the vast secondary literature concerning the Chrysostomic literary corpus very little attention has been paid to the c. 240 letters that have been passed down to us. With the exception of the editing by Anne-Marie Malingrey of the seventeen letters to Olympias and of the first letter to Innocent (ep. 1 ad Innocentem), 1 the analysis and edition of a small number of falsely attributed letters by Panagiotis Nikolopoulos, 2 the magisterial work by Roland Delmaire on the dating and prosopography of the remaining authentic letters, 3 and the recent translation of and historical annotation to thirty of the letters ad diversos, 4 only a handful of studies shed any useful light on the collection from an epistolary perspective. Because of interest by historians in the letters to Olympias, on the one hand, and the letters to Innocent, bishop of Rome, on the other, only a single study, that of Delmaire, 5 focuses on the collection as a whole. Building on Delmaire’s analysis of the order in which the letters have been transmitted in the manuscripts, 6 in this study we attempt to push our knowledge of the rationale for this one-sided and severely limited collection further by including consideration of the few extraneous letters that survive, and examining the two ps-Chrysostom letters (ep. 1 ad Cyriacum, ep. 233 ad episc. Antioch.) that the collection preserves. The questions that we pose are: do the ps-Chrysostom letters provide a clue as to who preserved the letters in the form that they were preserved and why? What clues do the rare letters addressed to John Chrysostom that survive in other letter collections or sources provide? Does the collection accurately represent the volume of letters that John wrote from exile, as Delmaire and the modern biographers assume? By gaining a better understanding of what was left out of the corpus as much as what it contains it is hoped to not just shed new light on the circumstances in which this collection was formed, but to elicit the kinds of information that can, within the limits of the collection, be retrieved. THE SHAPE OF THE LETTER COLLECTION The collection that we work with in the present day owes its shape to two distinct editorial phases: the selection and transmission of the letters in the manuscripts, and the production of 1 Malingrey 1968; Malingrey and Leclercq 1981: 68-94. Ep. 1 ad Innoc. is extracted by Malingrey from Palladius’ Dialogue, where it also appears as ch. 2, and is published separately in vol. 2 of her edition of the latter (SC 342). Regarding the double manuscript tradition of this letter see n. 6 below. 2 Nikolopoulos 1973b. For a summary of his conclusions re the dating and authorship of the letters see Nikolopoulos 1973a. 3 Delmaire 1991, 1997. 4 Barnes and Bevan 2013: 121-52. 5 Delmaire 1991. 6 Barnes and Bevan 2013: 124-6 argue for a slightly different dating for ep. 147 to Anthemius.