The Baptized Muse: Early Christian Poetry as Cultural Authority

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. With the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire increasing numbers of educated people converted to this new belief. As Christianity did not have its own educational institutions the issue of how to harmonize pagan education and Christian convictions became increasingly pressing. Especially classical poetry, the staple diet of pagan education, was considered to be morally corrupting (due to its deceitful mythological content) and damaging for the salvation of the soul (because of the false gods it advocated). But Christianity recoiled from an unqualified anti-intellectual attitude, while at the same time the experiment of creating an idiosyncratic form of genuinely Christian poetry failed (the sole exception being the poet Commodianus). In The Baptized Muse: Early Christian Poetry as Cultural Authority, Karla Pollmann argues that, instead, Christian poets made creative use of the classical literary tradition, and--in addition to blending it with Judaeo-Christian biblical exegesis--exploited poetry's special ability of enhancing communicative effectiveness and impact through aesthetic means. Pollman explores these strategies through a close analysis of a wide range of Christian, and for comparison partly also pagan, writers mainly from the fourth to sixth centuries. She reveals that early Christianity was not a hermetically sealed uniform body, but displays a rich spectrum of possibilities in dealing with the past and a willingness to engage with and adapt the surrounding culture(s), thereby developing diverse and changing responses to historical challenges. By demonstrating throughout that authority is a key in understanding the long denigrated and misunderstood early Christian poets, this book reaches the ground-breaking conclusion that early Christian poetry is an art form that gains its justification by adding cultural authority to Christianity. Thus, in a wider sense it engages with the recently developed interdisciplinary scholarly interest in aspects of religion as cultural phenomena.

Table of Contents:
I. Introduction: How to Approach Early Christian Poetry II. The Poetics of Authority in Early Christian Poetry 1: Tradition and Innovation. The Transformation of Classical Literary Genres in Christian Late Antiquity 2: The Test Case of Epic Poetry in Late Antiquity 3: Re-appropriation and Disavowal: Pagan and Christian Authorities in Cassiodorus and Venantius Fortunatus III. Christian Authority and Poetic Succession 1: Sex and Salvation in the Vergilian Cento of the Fourth Century 2: Versifying Authoritative Prose: Poetical Paraphrases of Eucherius of Lyon from Venantius Fortunatus to Siegbert of Gembloux 3: Jesus Christ and Dionysus: Rewriting Euripides in the Byzantine Cento Christus Patiens IV. Poetic Authority in Rivalling Cultural and Theological Discourses 1: Culture as Curse or Blessing? Prudentius and Avitus on the Origins of Culture 2: Christianity as Decadence or Progress in Pseudo-Hilary s Paraphrastic Verse Summary of the History of Salvation 3: How Far Can Sainthood Go? St Martin of Tours in Two Hagiographic Epics of Late Antiquity V. Conclusion: Authority as a Key to Understanding Early Christian Poetry VI. Bibliography

About the Author :
Karla Pollmann is Professor of Classics and Head of the School of Humanities at the University of Reading. Professor Pollmann is the co-editor of Augustine and the Disciplines: From Cassiciacum to Confessions (2007) and Augustine and the Disciplines: From Cassiciacum to Confessions (2005). She is also Editor-in-Chief of The Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine (OUP, 2013).

Review :
it should be apparent that Pollmann's scholarship offers significant contributions to the study of late antique Christianity as well as the reception of the Bible and classical literature more generally. Specialists in these areas have much to gain from this volume.