A conference report by guest author Markéta Preininger

Rodney Ast and Loreleï Vanderheyden of the SFB sub-project A02 “Antique Letters as a Means of Communication” organized a hybrid conference in Heidelberg on the 8th and 9th of November 2021 on the topic of letters, archives, and communication in Late Antiquity. As Rodney Ast remarked in his introduction to the conference, there has been an increasing focus in recent years on the appreciation of texts as physical products of communities organized around the cultures of writing. Materiality and text culture was thus the main focus of this conference on letters.