First ever critical edition of the corpus of forty-two Homilies by the Byzantine Emperor Leo VI the Wise (A.D. 886-912). The Homilies are highly rhetorical compositions and consist of panegyrics on ecclesiastical feasts and discourses on special occasions. They are gathered together here for the first time. Thirty-four texts were previously published in inadequate, antiquated and/or inaccessible editions. Another three remained unpublished. The critical edition of these important works of the emperor-scholar of the "Macedonian Renaissance" makes them easily accessible, responding to a desideratum of Byzantine Studies.

The edition is preceded by an original, full-length introduction on the extensive manuscript tradition of the Homilies divided into five chapters. The first four provide a solid investigation of the more than a hundred surviving codices that contain the Homilies, and elaborate on their relationship to each other. The final chapter presents the editorial principles. The establishment of the text according to the modern requirements of textual criticism is accompanied by a detailed critical apparatus as well as an apparatus of sources and significant parallel passages. A series of indices completes the work.

The book will appeal to specialists and students of Byzantine literature and civilization, philologists, historians, theologians and art historians alike, as well as specialists in patristic and medieval homiletics, classicists interested in the survival of the ancient Greek rhetorical and literary tradition, and linguists studying the Greek language in its medieval period. The texts can be used as teaching material at both graduate and undergraduate levels.

Theodora Antonopoulou is Associate Professor of Byzantine Literature at the University of Athens, Greece.