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One of the difficulties which an explicitly Christian poem, or artwork, presents for criticism is its appearance of thematic uniformity. Readers of such a poem frequently seem to think that the ideas are transcendent rather than historically particular. The enormous revival of interest in Christian and even Catholic poetry which began in the Modern Period and which flourished with New Criticism did not take any serious account of the work of Christina Rossetti. This chapter asks why is it that not a single critic associated with the New Critical movement ever wrote anything about Christina Rossetti. Fortunately, the ultimate marginality of Rossetti 's particular Christian stance was to become the source of its final strength, the privilege of its historical backwardness.

Sedulius is a rather shadowy figure, though he himself describes a circle of Christian devotees, probably in Italy, to which he belongs. Almost exactly one hundred years later than Juvencus – this chapter includes a brief survey of the significant developments in Christian poetry in that time – Sedulius differs notably from him, concentrating for the most part on the New Testament miracles, which he elaborates with powerful rhetoric. Each of his five books is examined in turn, with particular attention to the first, introductory book, in which his ingenious and obviously admiring uses of Vergil are prominent. Sedulius's strong theological position centres on his attacks on the controversial Nestorius, but it is also clear throughout the work, that he too engages thoughtfully with the diction and artistry of Vergil (though not, it is argued, with his hero Aeneas).

This chapter begins by assembling a detailed picture of the author, based on various evidence, and this is followed by an analysis of his preface, a striking manifesto for Christian poetry. Detailed comparison of Juvencus's poetic paraphrase with the New Testament shows how carefully he planned what to include and, no less significantly, what to omit. Epic touches in style and vocabulary, and even the occasional reconfiguration of an episode, appear often, and are illustrated with specimen passages quoted in Latin and with English translation. Further sections of the chapter illustrate the poet's keen if unobtrusive awareness of theological issues, and among other things make a case for seeing an even-handed attitude towards the Jewish nation. A final section discusses the work's particular purpose in the age of Constantine, to whom Juvencus dedicates the poem.

The ancient “quarrel between philosophy and poetry,” articulated anew as a quarrel between poetry and theology, became fundamental to the Christian conception of literature in the fourth through sixth centuries of the Latin West. Mediated through patristic literature, a Platonist critique of poetry dominated, denying poetry’s claims to truth and conferring upon poetry a secondary intellectual status. This chapter argues that Boethius counters this critique by merging poetic and philosophical discourses in order to renew poetry’s claims to truth and to develop a dualist poetics in which poetry shares in unifying the human and the divine. Finally, the chapter suggests that Boethius’s use of poetry in the consolatio helps to clarify the poetics of early Christian poets, among them Prudentius, whose work, like the consolatio, reflects a rapprochement between the poeta and the theologus, a development that Dante, Petrarch, and Milton would take for granted.

This chapter explores the limits to the importance of heresiological distinctions in the kingdom’s social and political life. It argues that elite individuals could use their Christian piety to display their social status in spite of contemporary ecclesiastical controversy. Apart from specific moments that required a courtier or aristocrat to define their Christian faith more exactly, the nature of courtly and aristocratic social interaction and the limits of government enforcement provided ample scope for artful dissimulation regarding doctrinal or ecclesiastical affiliation. The evidence of Christian martyrology, poetry, letters, and tombs is adduced to demonstrate that elite Christians, both Vandal and Romano-African, found ways to claim a determinedly Christian prestige that was nonetheless potentially acceptable to other members of the religiously heterogeneous elite.

This chapter focuses on the works of Prudentius and the tradition of late classical biblical epic exemplified by the poets Juvencus, Proba, Sedulius, Arator, and Avitus, with particular reference to their place in the history of classical reception. This place is doubly important. On the one hand, their verse provided a filter through which pagan classics, most notably Virgil, were transmitted to the Christian West; on the other hand, these poets themselves achieved canonical status. Particular attention is paid to the use of biblical epics in the school curriculum of the early Middle Ages, and to their influence on both Old and Middle English narrative and lyric verse.

This paper studies the reception of the Homeric Hymns in some pagan and Christian poets of Late Antiquity. It offers some methodological remarks on ‘quotations’ or ‘allusions’ and re-use of epic code; and on the need to distinguish between instances of epic language reused by Late Antique poets and actual quotations or borrowings from the Homeric Hymns. After an overall view on the presence of the Hymns in some major poets of Late Antiquity (especially Nonnus of Panopolis, Proclus, the Orphic Argonautica), I deal with the reception of the Hymns to Hermes, whose presence can be detected in papyri, inscriptions and highbrow poems (either pagans or Christians) from the second century until the fifth century AD. I argue that in Late Antiquity the concept of epic code was extended to the whole Homeric corpus, probably by the influence of school education.