Anger’s Broken Sword: Prudentius’ Psychomachia and the Iconography of Becket’s Martyrdom

Abstract

In some of the earliest images of Becket’s martyrdom, Reginald FitzUrse is shown breaking his sword on the saint's head; a detail at odds with the literal description of the martyrdom by the first hagiographers, who describe Richard le Bret’s sword breaking not on the head, but on the Cathedral pavement. This article contends that the iconography reflects the hagiographers’ allegorical, rather than literal, treatment of a martyrdom, in which Becket and the knights are polarised as embodiments of virtue and vice. The model for this interpretation was, it is argued, found in illustrated manuscripts of Prudentius’ ‘Psychomachia’, a Late Antique text about a battle between the Virtues and Vices widely read in medieval classrooms. In one episode, commonly illustrated over several scenes, Anger breaks her sword over the head of Patience. Echoes of the characterisation of both figures may be detected in hagiographical descriptions of Becket as unmoving and steadfast and of the knights, especially FitzUrse — the ursine associations of whose name was capitalised upon by the authors — as aggressive and, in the end, self-destructive. Allusions to the ‘Psychomachia’ by Becket’s commentators demonstrate the ways in which authoritative visual and textual sources were mined in the early years of Becket’s cult to lend spiritual weight to the story of his death, especially in the eyes of Christendom’s clerical elite. It shows the potential for visual metaphor to affect subliminally: to shift the focus from historical to allegorical truth, from the event to its meaning.