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3 books match the query 'Christian poetry, Latin'

cover of Bede and Aethelthryth: An Introduction to Christian Latin Poetics

Bede and Aethelthryth

An Introduction to Christian Latin Poetics

Stephen J. Harris

West Virginia University Press, 2016

Bede and Aethelthryth asks why Christians in Britain around the year 700 enjoyed Latin poetry. What did they see in it? What did they get from it? This book attempts to reconstruct the horizon of expectation of a highly learned, Latin-speaking nun as she encounters a fifty-line poem by the Venerable Bede, the Hymn to Aethelthryth. 

The reconstruction is hypothetical and derived from grammatical manuals, learned commentaries from the early medieval period (especially Servius’s commentary on Virgil), and a wide variety of aesthetic observations by classical and medieval readers. The first four chapters describe basic expectations of a reader of Christian Latin poetry. The fifth chapter places the Hymn in its context within Bede’s Ecclesiastical History. A few pages after Bede records his hymn, Caedmon will recite his own hymn under the watchful eye of Whitby’s Abbess Hild, who was a friend of Aethelthryth. 

Both hymns are attempts to reform the lyric traditions of pagan Rome and pagan Anglo-Saxon England in the light of Christian teaching. The last three chapters contain a line-by-line commentary on Bede’s alphabetic, epanaleptic elegy.

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cover of Poetry and the Cult of the Martyrs: The Liber Peristephanon of Prudentius

Poetry and the Cult of the Martyrs

The Liber Peristephanon of Prudentius

Michael Roberts

University of Michigan Press, 1993

Prudentius' Peristephanon is a collection of martyr texts from a vital period for the growth of martyr cult in the West. Building on recent work on the cult of the saints and on the sacralization of the space and time, Roberts demonstrates how the Peristephanon relates to developments in late fourth century spirituality.
The author examines how Prudentius creates an idiom to express devotion to the martyrs, particularly in the structuring of narrative and the use of poetic language. Roberts concludes by demonstrating how Prudentius employs the model of martyr cult to articulate the status of Christian literature, the role of the bishop in the Christian community, and the symbolic status of Rome in the Christian West.
Michael Roberts is Robert Rich Professor of Latin, Wesleyan University.
Jacket art: Gold-glass vase, after A.D. 350. By permission of the Trustees of the British Museum.
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cover of The Humblest Sparrow: The Poetry of Venantius Fortunatus

The Humblest Sparrow

The Poetry of Venantius Fortunatus

Michael Roberts

University of Michigan Press, 2010

In The Humblest Sparrow, Michael Roberts illuminates the poetry of the sixth-century bishop and poet Venantius Fortunatus. Often regarded as an important transitional figure, Fortunatus wrote poetry that is seen to bridge the late classical and earlier medieval periods. Written in Latin, his poems combined the influences of classical Latin poets with a medieval tone, giving him a special place in literary history. Yet while interest has been growing in the early Merovingian period, and while the writing of Fortunatus' patron Gregory of Tours has been well studied, Fortunatus himself has often been neglected. This neglect is remedied by this in-depth study, which will appeal to scholars of late antique, early Christian, and medieval Latin poetry. Roberts divides Fortunatus' poetry into three main groups: poetry of praise, hagiographical poetry, and personal poetry. In addition to providing a general survey, Roberts discusses in detail many individual poems and proposes a number of theses on the nature, function, relation to social and linguistic context, and survival of Fortunatus' poetry, as well as the image of the poet created by his work.

Jacket illustration: L. Alma Tadema, Venantius Fortunatus Reading his Poems to Radegonda VI AD 555. (Courtesy of Dordrecht, Dordrechts Museum.)
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