Converting Verse

Abstract This book is concerned with the Christianization of Latin poetry during the turbulent fifth century, a period in which the Roman world experienced barbarian incursion, the rise of monasticism, and the collapse of the Western Empire itself. Exploration focuses on Christian verse composed within contexts shaped by the dynamic ascetic movement of southern Gaul, and reveals a world of competing theories of poetry and practices of Christian writing. In the fifth century, Christian poetry became an especially contested discourse. Ascendant ascetic authorities promoted ethics of thinking, speaking, reading, and writing that were distinctive from, and sometimes opposed to, the premises and practices of the classical poetic tradition. Aristocratic authors, moved by these ascetic ideas and facing a decline in the imperial structures from which they had once derived support, became consumed by the challenge of converting the prestigious forms and language of classicizing poetry into useful facets of Christian piety. The book explicates the strategies that Gallo-Roman poets crafted to integrate classical literary habits within their intensifying Christian lives, as well as to express the ambiguities that attended changes of identity, practice, and belief. Employing approaches from classical studies, religious studies, and literary theory, it argues that the significance of Christian poetic experimentation was not restricted to the aesthetic domain, but had profound social and cultural implications as well. In Latin Late Antiquity, Christian verse writing became one of the most distinctive modes for negotiating cultural boundaries between the sacred and the secular, the classical and the Christian.