Talk:Michael Psellos

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[edit] "Michael Psellus the elder"?

The existence of the person treated in this article is currently questioned. The following is moved here from a discussion between User_Talk:Robth and User_Talk:LukasPietsch:

[...] Michael Psellus the Elder is an article based on the 1911 Enc. Brittanica. Trouble is, the Enc.Br. gives no sources in turn; it also states that no writings of that guy have been preserved, so how do we even know he existed? He is in none of the more recent works I've checked - the present version of Enc.Br., Pauly's Reallexicon, a couple of other general-purpose encyclopedias. Nothing in the specialist literature on the "younger" Psellos either that would suggest the existence of a confusable namesake. What makes the whole thing even more fishy is that much of the information the article gives on the "elder" (except his geographical provenance from Andros) sounds almost as if it could also apply to either of the other two Psellos, so I have the suspicion his whole existence might be a philological misunderstanding that has in the meantime been solved by scholarship. Does your library have anything where you could look up a topic like this? Lukas ^(T.|@) 09:12, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

I searched through a number of different reference books--including extensive ones devoted to philosophy, theology, and Byzantium--and histories of the period, and came up with absolutely nothing on the elusive "elder"; I think you must be right in your guess that some reference to the well attested Psellus was misconstrued to refer to a different individual, and that this has been cleared up since 1911. [...] Robth^Talk 20:53, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

Discussion moved here by Lukas ^(T.|@) 21:05, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

Hah, I found it. Paul Lemerle (1971), Le premier humanisme byzantin, 1st page of ch.6 (p. 129 in Greek translated edition) and fn. 6., deals with the question. It's just as I thought: A misunderstanding based on one equivocal and probably mistaken mentioning of the name in one medieval chronicle, the Σύναψη Κεδρηνού-Σκυλίτση. The guy is a phantom. Lukas ^(T.|@) 23:21, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

I've now treated it under Michael Psellus the Younger#Pseudo-Psellus. The whole Michael Psellus the Younger should be moved to Michael Psellus and the current dab page deleted. Lukas ^(T.|@) 00:07, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

Based on the above I've deleted the dab, and moved this article there. Paul August ☎ 17:31, 9 February 2006 (UTC)