Poetry and Exegesis in Premodern Latin Christianity

Poetry and Exegesis in Premodern Latin Christianity
Author: Willemien Otten
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 379
Release: 2007
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004160698

This volume presents a broad variety of specifically Christian approaches to poetry and analyses modes of interpreting the Bible that are new in poetry compared with prose exegesis. Both theoretical statements on poetry by Christians and concrete poetic works from roughly 300 to 1250 AD are taken into account.

Poetry and Exegesis in Premodern Latin Christianity

Poetry and Exegesis in Premodern Latin Christianity
Author: Willemien Otten
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 378
Release: 2007-09-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9047421329

This volume investigates various exegetical possibilities in Christian Latin poetry during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. In the Latin West poetry was mainly associated with the powerful pagan tradition of writers like Vergil and Ovid, and by many poetry was considered to tell lies and provide mere entertainment potentially corrupting the soul. Therefore, Christians initially had reservations about this genre and believed it to be incompatible with Christian worship, literacy and intellectual activity. In practice, however, forms of specifically Christian poetry developed from the end of the third century onwards; theoretical reconciliations were developed around 400 A.D. This collection examines specimens of Christian poetry from Juvencus (the first biblical epicist shortly after 300) up to the thirteenth century. Its particular usefulness lies in the combination of literary theory and hermeneutics, close readings of the texts and new readings on a sound philological basis.

The Poetics of Late Latin Literature

The Poetics of Late Latin Literature
Author: Jaś Elsner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 545
Release: 2017
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199355630

For a host of reasons, traditionalist scholarship has failed to give a full and positive account of the formal, aesthetic and religious transformations of ancient poetics in Late Antiquity. This collection of new essays attempts to capture the vibrancy of the living ancient tradition reinventing itself in a new context in the hands of a series of great Latin writers of the fourth and fifth centuries AD.

The Philosophy, Theology, and Rhetoric of Marius Victorinus

The Philosophy, Theology, and Rhetoric of Marius Victorinus
Author: Stephen A. Cooper
Publisher: SBL Press
Total Pages: 593
Release: 2022-10-07
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1628375299

Pagan rhetor, (Neo-)Platonist philosopher, Christian theologian This collection of essays is devoted to the rhetoric, Neoplatonic philosophy, and Christian theology of Marius Victorinus, a mid-fourth-century professor of rhetoric and philosopher who converted to Christianity late in life. Scholars from eight different countries, some of whom have not previously published in English, reflect on debates about his writings and theological development. These topics include Victorinus's deployment of philosophical sources for trinitarian theology, possible connections in his work to Origen, Augustine, Plotinus, Porphyry, and Gnosticism, as well as his contributions to Latin rhetoric and dialectic. Contributors include Jan Dominik Bogataj, Michael Chase, Nello Cipriani, Stephen A. Cooper, Volker Henning Drecoll, Lenka Karfíková, Josef Lössl, Václav Němec, Thomas Riesenweber, Guadalupe Lopetegui Semperena, Miran Špelič, Chiara O. Tommasi, John D. Turner, and Florian Zacher. The chapters in this volume are of great interest to students of late antique philosophy, Christian theology, and Latin rhetoric.

A Late Antique Poetics?

A Late Antique Poetics?
Author: Joshua Hartman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2023-06-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350346411

The poetry of the late Roman world has a fascinating history. Sometimes an object of derision, sometimes an object of admiration, it has found numerous detractors and defenders among classicists and Latin literary critics. This volume explores the scholarly approaches to late Latin poetry that have developed over the last 40 years, and it seeks especially to develop, complement and challenge the seminal concept of the 'Jeweled Style' proposed by Michael Roberts in 1989. While Roberts's monograph has long been a vade mecum within the world of late antique literary studies, a critical reassessment of its validity as a concept is overdue. This volume invites established and emerging scholars from different research traditions to return to the influential conclusions put forward by Roberts. It asks them to examine the continued relevance of The Jeweled Style and to suggest new ways to engage it. In a joint effort, the nineteen chapters of this volume define and map the jeweled style, extending it to new genres, geographic regions, time periods and methodologies. Each contribution seeks to provide insightful analysis that integrates the last 30 years of scholarship while pursuing ambitious applications of the jeweled style within and beyond the world of late antiquity.

A Companion to Late Antique Literature

A Companion to Late Antique Literature
Author: Scott McGill
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 704
Release: 2018-09-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1118830342

Noted scholars in the field explore the rich variety of late antique literature With contributions from leading scholars in the field, A Companion to Late Antique Literature presents a broad review of late antique literature. The late antique period encompasses a significant transitional era in literary history from the mid-third century to the early seventh century. The Companion covers notable Greek and Latin texts of the period and provides a varied overview of literature written in six other late antique languages. Comprehensive in scope, this important volume presents new research, methodologies, and significant debates in the field. The Companion explores the histories, forms, features, audiences, and uses of the literature of the period. This authoritative text: Provides an inclusive overview of late antique literature Offers the widest survey to date of the literary traditions and forms of the period, including those in several languages other than Greek and Latin Presents the most current research and new methodologies in the field Contains contributions from an international group of contributors Written for students and scholars of late antiquity, this comprehensive volume provides an authoritative review of the literature from the era.

Sedulius, The Paschal Song and Hymns

Sedulius, The Paschal Song and Hymns
Author:
Publisher: SBL Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2013-06-05
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1589837444

This is the first complete English translation of the poetic works of Sedulius, a Christian Latin poet of late antiquity whose biblical epic and hymns were enormously popular during the Middle Ages and the early modern period. The introduction places the poet and his works into his historical and literary contexts, followed by the Latin text of Sedulius’s poetic works with English translation on facing pages. Notes on linguistic and historical matters are designed to help the reader with little or no Latin and only some familiarity with Sedulius’s classical and biblical sources. Appendices supply texts and translations of incidental related materials, including Sedulius’s dedicatory letters; biographical notices, subscriptions, and laudatory poems associated with Sedulius’s works in the manuscript tradition; and representative excerpts from Sedulius’s own prose paraphrase of the Paschale Carmen. The volume includes a bibliography and index.

Structures of Epic Poetry

Structures of Epic Poetry
Author: Christiane Reitz
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 2760
Release: 2019-12-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110492598

This compendium (4 vols.) studies the continuity, flexibility, and variation of structural elements in epic narratives. It provides an overview of the structural patterns of epic poetry by means of a standardized, stringent terminology. Both diachronic developments and changes within individual epics are scrutinized in order to provide a comprehensive structural approach and a key to intra- and intertextual characteristics of ancient epic poetry.

The Space That Remains

The Space That Remains
Author: Aaron Pelttari
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2014-09-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0801455006

In The Space That Remains, Aaron Pelttari offers the first systematic study of the major fourth-century poets since Michael Robert's foundational The Jeweled Style. It is the first book to give equal attention to both Christian and Pagan poetry and the first to take seriously the issue of readership. As Pelttari shows, the period marked a turn towards forms of writing that privilege the reader's active involvement in shaping the meaning of the text. In the poetry of Ausonius, Claudian, and Prudentius we can see the increasing importance of distinctions between old and new, ancient and modern, forgotten and remembered. The strange traditionalism and verbalism of the day often concealed a desire for immediacy and presence. We can see these changes most clearly in the expectations placed upon readers. The space that remains is the space that the reader comes to inhabit, as would increasingly become the case in the literature of the Latin Middle Ages.

Jerome's Commentaries on the Pauline Epistles and the Architecture of Exegetical Authority

Jerome's Commentaries on the Pauline Epistles and the Architecture of Exegetical Authority
Author: Andrew Cain
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2021
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0192847198

In the late fourth and early fifth centuries, during a fifty-year stretch sometimes dubbed a Pauline renaissance of the western church, six different authors produced over four dozen commentaries in Latin on Paul's epistles. Among them was Jerome, who commented on four epistles (Galatians, Ephesians, Titus, Philemon) in 386 after recently having relocated to Bethlehem from Rome. His commentaries occupy a time-honored place in the centuries-long tradition of Latin-language commenting on Paul's writings. They also constitute his first foray into the systematic exposition of whole biblical books (and his only experiment with Pauline interpretation on this scale), and so they provide precious insight into his intellectual development at a critical stage of his early career before he would go on to become the most prolific biblical scholar of Late Antiquity. This monograph provides the first book-length treatment of Jerome's opus Paulinum in any language. Adopting a cross-disciplinary approach, Cain comprehensively analyzes the commentaries' most salient aspects-from the inner workings of Jerome's philological method and engagement with his Greek exegetical sources, to his recruitment of Paul as an anachronistic surrogate for his own theological and ascetic special interests. One of the over-arching concerns of this book is to explore and to answer, from multiple vantage points, a question that was absolutely fundamental to Jerome in his fourth-century context: what are the sophisticated mechanisms by which he legitimized himself as a Pauline commentator, not only on his own terms but also vis-à-vis contemporary western commentators?