Confronting a Gens Ferox: Jews in the Poetry and Prose of Venantius Fortunatus

Gregory's narrative in his De virtutibus sancti Martini (1.11) has been the source of much discussion by modern scholars. The text bears directly on the process of the conversion of the Sueves out of Arianism to Catholic Christianity in sixth-century Gallaecia during the reign of the Suevic King Chararic (550?-558?), a personage unidentified by any other source, Gallic or Iberian. Most scholars have cited the text as wholly reliable without any sufficient critical analysis. E. A. Thompson, in a recent study dismissed the entire account as fictitious hagiography devoid of any historical value. This article is a first attempt to deal with the discrepancies between Gregory's text and those by Isidore of Seville and John of Biclar. The valuable works of Martin of Braga and Venantius Fortunatus are likewise given due consideration. The historical worth of Gregory's account is vindicated, as well as its rightful place as a critical source for events in sixth-century Gallaecia .

Rivers of Risk and Redemption in Gregory of Tours’ Writings

The Spirituality of Chrysostom's Commentary on the Psalms Robert C. Hill Abstract Chrysostom does not figure in traditional lists of spiritual guides from antiquity, nor his Commentary on the Psalms among spiritual classics. This may be due to ignorance of it by modern commentators, though aspects of its spiritual teaching could contribute to this omission: the preacher's accent—if preached the commentaries were—on a balance of human effort and divine grace in the process of salvation was thought pelagian by some in the West in the patristic age. No mystic, Chrysostom can be pedestrian in his approach to prayer, and the claim some have made for him as initiator of a lay spirituality is open to question. But there is no doubting the Scriptural fare he provided to his (male) congregations in his classroom. Of the great texts called into service by Christian commentators from the beginning for spiritual direction or simply moral guidance, a principal one—yielding pride of place only to the Gospels—has been the Psalter. Over thirty of the Fathers are known to have composed commentaries on this book of the Bible,1 though we are not fortunate enough to have all these still at our disposal or in direct manuscript tradition. One of the better represented is that by John Chrysostom, preacher in Antioch in the late fourth century, from which period of his ministry of the Word the Commentary seems to come, and then bishop of Constantinople. Not the whole of the Psalter is included in the text we have;2 even in the ninth century Photius, bishop of that same see, admitted its incompleteness, leaving the question open as to whether Chrysostom ever [End Page 569] commented on every psalm.3 Beyond the fifty eight in the extant collection of ¥rmhneÝai beginning at Ps 4, we have also commentaries on Ps 3 and verses of other psalms that are authentic but not of this collection (if the term "series" begs the question). Not only does the condition of the Commentary leave us with a relatively hefty corpus of patristic material on this important text for spiritual formation. It also has the advantage of coming to us in direct and (compared with Chrysostom's New Testament works) uncomplicated manuscript tradition,4 and of not being clearly and directly dependent on the work of earlier commentators—a dependence that marks some of the better known Psalms commentaries from antiquity, as Rondeau capably demonstrates. Chrysostom occasionally betrays awareness of other views on a verse; but it is less a tribute to his integrity than an acknowledgment of his ignorance of or disdain for the work of "the scholars" (as he rather pejoratively terms them on occasion) that we do not have to debate the provenance of his teaching on the psalms. Neglect of Chrysostom's Commentary Yet this lengthy work and its composer have not found widespread recognition in histories of Christian spirituality. This is probably not due to a quibble about the circumstances of its composition/delivery, of which Photius even a millennium ago in Constantinople acknowledged ignorance and which modern scholars have not been able to clarify with certainty;5 nor would the lack of a critical edition of the text be to blame. Perhaps it has more to do with the extent of the work and its lack of availability in modern languages that accounts for its failure to provide documentation for commentators on Chrysostom's significance in that history of notable guides of the Christian faithful since the New Testament. The treatment [End Page 570] of "Patristic spirituality" in The New Dictionary of Christian Spirituality does not accord a place to the golden-mouthed preacher in a section on "the Golden Age,"6 nor does he rate a mention in Andrew Louth's classic text, where Origen and Augustine are thought worthy of chapter-length treatment.7 Charles Kannengiesser is more concessive in acknowledging his contribution to "the spiritual message of the great Fathers," though the Psalms commentary is not cited,8 as is true of the lengthy article on "Jean Chrysostome" by Antoine Wenger in the Dictionnaire de spiritualité.9 At least Wenger, and more so Louis...

An early example of an African American novel, and earliest known novel by an African American woman writer, Harrie E. Wilson's Our Nig (1859) has prompted ongoing excitement among modern scholars. Since Henry Louis Gates, Jr. discovered text more than a decade ago, contemporary criticism of Our Nig has for most part linked autobiographical novel to nineteenth-century tradition of slave narrative and sentimental novel. Wilson's adaptation of conversion narrative warrants further discussion,(1) however, because it represents a literary experiment more complex than mere imitation or synthesis of popular literary genres. Frado's failed conversion affords Wilson literary space to undermine prevailing social constructions of Christianity, race, and womanhood. Through Frado's narrative, Wilson demonstrates how Christian doctrine anchors popular notions of womanhood and domesticity, and how these concepts are limited by race and racial signifiers. Though Wilson manipulates well-known trappings of conversion narrative that date back to American Puritan tradition, Our Nig tells story of heroine's failed initiation into community of earthly saints. Moreover, Frado's rejection of Christianity's promised eternity demonstrates how race might interrupt Christian rite of passage for those black candidates who could not resolve ambiguities of popular racial myths. In both her worldly and spiritual quests, Frado faces limitations imposed by race. From moment Wilson introduces story of Jim and Mag's union, we begin to see an unsettling vision of Christianity and racial blackness as diametric opposites. black outside, I know,' Jim tells Mag, `but I's a heart inside' (12). For Jim, blackness stands in contradistinction to Christian images of goodness; moreover, with unfolding of Frado's narrative, we become increasingly aware that race stands as an obstacle to her religious conversion as well. Frado's inability to envision black souls as candidates for heaven thwarts her full submission to conversion process, and her failed religious conversion impels story's deviation from popular conventions of domestic fiction. A text that uses conversion narrative pattern, Our Nig ends as an anti-conversion experience. Unable to dispel inherited social images that equate whiteness with Godliness, heroine cannot envision blackness in divine hereafter. In a novel by a black woman writer more than a century after publication of Our Nig, we witness kind of narrative that can result a fictionalized black female heroine successfully resolves question of race and religious experience. In Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Celie finds God only after she expels whiteness that threatens her conversion. Celie shares with Shug her image of God as big and old and tall and graybearded and white (176). However, Celie confesses that vision of God leaves her uncomfortable: when I think about it, it don't seem quite right. But it all I got (176). As a confidant and mentor to Celie, Shug explains that this old man is same God she used to see she prayed (177). She then shares with Celie her vision of a God who is found in everything and everyone, and informs Celie that first step to finding God is to remove the old man, in order to see God who exists everywhere. This transformation is not an easy one. Celie reveals difficulty in trying to rid oneself of old man: Well, us talk and talk bout God, but I'm still adrift. Trying to that old man out of my head (179). Again, she reveals seeming omnipresence of whiteness that makes it so difficult to chase away images of whiteness as inherently powerful: on your box of grits, in your head, and all over radio. He try to make you think he everywhere. Soon as you think he everywhere, you think he God. …

While significant debates are still ongoing, modern scholarship has made great strides in describing the nature of verbal irony and the sorts of markers that signal its use. Much of this research, however, has focused on the English language, leaving significant linguistic and historical data untouched. This study aims to fill a portion of this lacuna by investigating the typical cues for indicating sarcastic irony amongst those who invented it—or at least the term—the ancient Greeks. To this end, taking modern scholarship as our starting point, we shall proceed by investigating the extent to which various cues discussed in the literature are also present in ancient sarcasm, while taking note of cases where certain markers are more idiomatic to the ancient world. Our dataset for this task will be drawn from two diverse corpora, the writings of Lucian—arguably one of antiquity’s most prolific sarcasts—and the New Testament. While the cues that signal sarcastic intent across these texts share many similarities to those discussed in modern research, significant differences attest to the impact of both cultural and linguistic forces on the ways in which the ancient Greeks went about being sarcastic.

For over a century modern scholars have passionately debated whether Augustine’s conversion narrative from Confessions 8 is an accurate description of what ‘has really happened’ in 386 in a garden in Milan without reaching so far a consensus. However, long before modern scholars disputed the historicity of his conversion account Augustine was already confronted with the mistrust of his contemporaries who doubted the authenticity of his conversion and compelled to deal with their accusations. This article intends to show how in the Confessions Augustine defends the truth of his narrative while admitting to his incredulous readers his inability to offer an exact picture of his past life, by looking at his views on memory, language and cognition, as presented mainly in the last non-narrative books of this work.

Eucherius narrates in his Passio Acaunensium Martyrum that during the persecution under Diocletian a whole army of Christian soldiers from the Egyptian Thebais, under their leader Mauritius, was killed at Acaunum in the Swiss Alps. The soldiers died as martyrs because they refused to obey the emperor's order to fight against fellow-Christians. This brief prose narrative had a textual transmission and manifested its influence both in places of worship and an iconographic tradition up to the late Middle Ages. A further aspect of the Passio's reception manifests itself in various versifications of this story that have so far attracted any attention and is the topic of this investigation. The poetic paraphrases of Venantius Fortunatus, Walafrid Strabo, and Sigebert of Gembloux are analysed. The most important changes in these paraphrases in comparison with their prose hypotext are further highlighted. Keywords: Christian; Egyptian Thebais; Eucherius; Passio Acaunensium Martyrum ; Sigebert of Gembloux; Venantius Fortunatus; Walafrid Strabo

The article examines the question of how and why the topic of Jews was raised in the Gallic Christian literature of the VI–VII centuries, what image of Jews in the minds of readers was formed by stories whose heroes were Jews, what forms of relations between Christians and Jewish people were consolidated on the basis of literary examples. The main sources are the works of Gregory of Tours, Venantius Fortunatus, as well as anonymous hagiographic works of the VII century. The article is written within the framework of intellectual and new cultural history, in order to obtain adequate conclusions, the authors analyze the language and textual features of narratives. The article shows that the Jewish theme was not independent in either the historical or hagiographic literature of late Antique Gaul, while addressing it allowed late Antique authors to give the reader an understanding of what place Jews occupy in Christian society, and what are the boundaries of relations with them. In particular, it is shown that the Jews were perceived within the framework of the history of Salvation as "sheep of another fold", a source of tension. The sense of danger emanating from them was reinforced in the minds of readers thanks to the anti-Jewish rhetoric. Jews in the eyes of the reader of late Antiquity should have been associated with unbelief, deception, disobedience; they should have caused physical rejection and disgust, they are associated with darkness, blood, and a stench emanates from them. At the same time, since these "others" within the framework of the history of Salvation should become part of the Lord's fold, late Antique literature actively uses the image of a worthy shepherd who devotes himself to preaching the Gospel to Jews and who, by the power of words or miracles, brings them into the bosom of the Church.

The prevailing view in modern scholarship is that Bede reduced the role of women in his narrative of Anglo-Saxon conversion, in contrast to Gregory of Tours with whom Bede is unfavourably compared. In Gregory’s account of the conversion of Clovis, king of the Franks, he allowed an overt role for the king’s wife, Clotild, whereas in Bede’s presentation of mixed marriages between Christian queens and pagan kings his queens did not actively convert their husbands. This essay presents a counter thesis arguing that the importance of Christian queens can be detected in Bede’s Historia when attention is paid to scriptural imagery and exegetical allusions in his text. Bede’s Historia is the only early source that refers to Christian queens at pagan courts and his presentation indicates that these women fulfilled scriptural precepts such as 1 Cor. 7:14, ‘the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the believing wife’. This theological dimension reveals the unique role played by Christian queens in the conversion of their husbands and the significance of royal marriages in the acceptance of Christianity in Anglo-Saxon England.

Nizarorustu: A Textual Analysis of the Battle of Niså

Cases of conscience are real or imagined moral dilemmas involving a choice between two non-ideal courses of action. Writings on cases of conscience – casuistry – were a feature of Catholic moral philosophy through the early modern period and into the nineteenth century, with a phase of particular notoriety in the mid seventeenth century. To historians of the Counter-Reformation, casuistry is a familiar concept because of the abundance of writings on practical ethics produced and because the subject of casuistry played a prominent role in religious polemic. When Martin Luther made a bonfire of books he believed to be dangerous to the Christian faith in 1520, he included a popular book of cases of conscience, the Summa Angelica . Blaise Pascal satirised the casuistry of the Jesuits in his Lettres Provinciales. In reformed England in the late sixteenth century, Jesuit evangelists were found to carry small treatises with advice on cases of conscience originating from the seminaries at Douai and Rheims, which were intended to provide moral guidance to Catholics negotiating a complicated path between dissimulation and recusancy. Although casuistry is thus most associated with the social and religious history of the sixteenth century, it was also a common feature of penitential writing in England and Europe in the thirteenth century. Earlier writings on moral cases have attracted much sparser recognition in modern scholarship than their early-modern counterparts, yet they were no less a feature of medieval pastoral treatises, and played just as crucial a role in medieval pastoral care. These medieval moral dilemmas are the subject of this paper; it will argue that their appearance in English confessors’ manuals marked the beginning of a new genre of Catholic moral philosophy. There had, of course, been discussions about applied ethics before the thirteenth century, but this was the first time that there was a sustained interest in the subject, and that it was attached so closely to pastoral care and penitence. The combination of moral dilemmas and penitential advice would later also characterise the collections of cases of conscience in the sixteenth century. ‘Casuistry’ was not immediately recognised as such in the Middle Ages.

Radegund of Poitiers (520–587) was a princess of the Thuringian kingdom, wife to the Merovingian king Clothar I, and ultimately domina of the abbey of Sainte-Croix in Poitiers. The literary persona of Saint Radegund, as constructed by the poet-hagiographer Venantius Fortunatus and, a few years later, by the nun Baudonivia, underpins the historical figure. The saint exerted a significant cultural influence across Frankish territories, and over the ages her image has been continuously received, reinterpreted, and expanded. The purpose of this study is to provide a survey of the critical reception of Radegund’s character, in order to explore how modern scholarship has interpreted and reimagined her persona over time.

Modern scholarship on theories of religion, and on the early Reformation, has grappled with the problem of how to define a movement such as Lutheranism. What did King Sigismund I of Poland and his subjects, in their own day, perceive Lutheranism to be? This chapter uses language analysis of a diverse and large corpus of sources from across the Polish monarchy to answer that question. Among Catholics, Lutheranism was only weakly identified as a heresy, and medieval anti-heretical rhetoric rarely deployed against it. Lutheranism was, instead, read as an epidemic of familiar forms of irreligiosity—e.g. sacrilege. It was principally characterized as a threat to peace, unity, and community (in town, kingdom, Christendom)—its actual doctrines of only minimal interest. The King’s Lutheran subjects, by contrast, defined themselves insistently with reference to the doctrine of ‘sola fide’.

Reviewed by: The Unfamiliar Shelley Christopher Stokes The Unfamiliar Shelley. Edited by Alan M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009. Pp. 369. ISBN 9780754663904. £60.00. A collection of fifteen essays ranging across poetry, prose and drama – with a single piece focusing on ekphrasis and visuality somewhat orphaned in its own section – The Unfamiliar Shelley defines its scope forcefully and unambiguously: to shake up familiar conceptions of Shelley. Of course, what stands as unfamiliar is relative. Keen or adventurous undergraduates may well have found themselves reading Queen Mab, the fairy-tale elements of which are characterised by Christopher R. Miller as secularising a 'vestigial poetics of heaven', or Peter Bell the Third, read by Stephen C. Behrendt as encrypting both a debt to the values of early Wordsworth and a critique of the same poet's late phase. By contrast, Michael Rossington's intricate and fascinating passage through the manuscripts and drafts of the sonnet known as 'Political Greatness' relies on far less accessible textual sources, while the quintet of essays on the prose refers to material that is likely to be known to aficionados and experts only. The editors' introduction strikes the keynote for the whole when they emphasise the neglected heterogeneity of Shelley's output. Virtually all the essays tend to make a case for revaluing their diverse subjects for what they are in themselves, rather than as merely illuminating sidelights and supplements to the more conventionally canonical (and perhaps homogeneously lyrical and idealist) Shelley. The two opening essays are exemplary in this respect. Both authors do make informative gestures towards more familiar texts: Michael Bradshaw's analysis of Shelley's fragments invokes 'The Triumph of Life' and David Duff argues that the Esdaile Notebook provides the missing link between early political verse and the watershed marked by the introspective 'Alastor'. Yet both analyses persuasively lay out the intrinsic interest and sophistication of the less well-known texts they study. In Bradshaw's hands, Shelley's notebook [End Page 187] fragments become a figure for both reading and writing as errant acts, inscribing in their very unfinishedness a break from writing to something other than language. Duff also entwines reflexivity and textuality, describing a poetics of acute self-analysis in the 1813 poems that rests most fascinatingly on a practice of self-quotation. There is a genuine sense that these poems have been unjustly overlooked, and should be re-read. Aside from a commitment to a more diverse textual corpus, then, what do these essays have in common? Although modern scholarship is hardly in thrall to the portrait of an ineffectual angel, least of all historicist studies of Shelley's radicalism, much of the intellectual work carried out here shows that further reversing the terms of the Victorian caricature is still imperative. Two threads of this kind running throughout the collection are materiality and irony. While one would hesitate before the notion of a comic Shelley, many of the essays acknowledge and define a playful side to his work: Behrendt's piece sets off from Shelley's ambivalent relationship with the possibilities of satire, while Timothy Webb persuasively describes the 'Letter to Maria Gisbourne' as suspending more haunting, severe themes in the lighter, more polite, form of the verse-epistle. In relation to the sceptical, pragmatic and ultimately Socratic contexts of the religious and philosophical prose identified by Merle A. Williams, the attention given to the witty, acerbic 'On the Devil, and Devils' is quite in place, and the daring reversals found there anticipate the carnivalesque monde renversé noted by Timothy Morton (with revolutionary and utopian overtones) in the unusual drama Swellfoot the Tyrant. Alongside this ironic Shelley (seen also in the more Schlegelian irony that Hugh Roberts uncovers in Shelley's prefaces), a counter-intuitive Shelley is exposed through a recurrent interest in things, materialities, flesh and so forth. Although perhaps implicit in earlier essays – the alternative transcendence, rooted in the this-worldly, imagined by Miller at the end of his reading of Queen Mab for instance – a material Shelley really steps forward with Jack Donavan's reading of Laon and Cyntha, with its repeated references to the erotic. It is a shame, in fact, that...

The Last Epic of Antiquity:Generic Continuity and Innovation in the Vita Sancti Martini of Venantius Fortunatus* Michael Roberts The poet Venantius Fortunatus has been described as the last poet of antiquity and the first of the Middle Ages (Bernt 118). He was educated in the schools of Ravenna, where he received the literary education traditional in late antiquity. In 566, however, he moved from his native land to the proto-medieval kingdoms of Merovingian Gaul, where he employed his poetic skills in the service of kings, nobles, and bishops of sixth-century Francia. Many of his poems are short, epigram-like compositions in the service of his new patrons. The chief exception is the Vita Sancti Martini (VSM), a narrative poem in four books of dactylic hexameters, 2243 lines in all, recounting the adventures of a Christian hero, the apostle of Gaul.1 [End Page 257] In meter, scope, and mode of representation the VSM conforms to the expectations of epic. Written in the mid-570s (completed between September 573 and April 576), the poem relies on prose narratives of Sulpicius Severus, the Life of Martin and the Dialogues (2 and 3), for its content. It represents for Fortunatus a rare foray into hexameters (only four other poems in his large corpus are in that meter).2 Accompanying the poem are a dedicatory letter to Bishop Gregory of Tours and a metrically distinct preface, in the manner of late antique epic, attributing its composition to the commands (imperia, 30) of Radegund and Agnes, respectively founder and abbess of the convent of the Holy Cross at Poitiers, with which Fortunatus had close connections.3 The work, with its praise of Hilary of Poitiers (1.123–45), as well as of Martin, was well suited to both its audiences but, unlike much of Fortunatus poetry, its subject does not depend on any particular occasion and is not specific to a particular addressee. In its level of intent the poem is clearly distinct from the majority of Fortunatus poetry. An epic, then, to all appearances, but not one that reads at all like the more familiar texts from the Augustan, Neronian, or Flavian periods. In this paper I will try to outline the development of the hagiographical epic the subgenre in which Fortunatus is writing and will link it to developments in Latin hexameter narrative poetry, both sacred and secular, in late antiquity; I will identify other features of the poem that, I believe, reflect Fortunatus generic aspirations; and finally I will isolate qualities of the poem that set it apart from its predecessors and represent Fortunatus particular contribution to the hagiographical epic. In speaking of genre in the context of late antiquity I find Jauss approach, developed for medieval literature, most helpful. Instead of positing stable generic laws, Jauss emphasizes the diachronic evolution of genres. For him the history of literary genres [is] a temporal process of the continual founding and altering of horizons [of expectations] (Jauss 94). A new text evokes for the reader (listener) the horizon of expectations and rules of the game familiar to him from earlier texts, which as such can then be varied, extended, corrected, but also transformed, crossed out, or simply reproduced (Jauss 88). Genres are constituted by a combination of formal and thematic elements. As codified discursive norms, genres perpetuate distinctive takes on the world according to [End Page 258] their established systems of representation. They may originally arise to fulfill specific cultic, religious, and/or social functions or needs, but are liable to a process of gradual literarization.4 In the case of epic in late antiquity it is worth noting that a diachronic development of new epic forms the panegyrical epic, the biblical epic, and the hagiographical epic coexists with continued composition in more traditional forms, such as the mythical epic. (Claudian s de Raptu Proserpinae is more traditional in subject matter than his other long poems that combine epic narrative with panegyric or invective.) Returning to Fortunatus: he begins his Life of Martin with an account of his literary forbears.5 They are exclusively Christian (VSM 1.10–25): Quae conversatus dederat (sc. Christus) miracula terrismulta, evangelici reserante volumine libri...