Prudentius Clemens, Aurelius, 348–after 405 CE

Author(s):  
Cillian O'Hogan

Aurelius Prudentius Clemens was a Christian Latin poet who wrote in a variety of genres and metres. Born in northern Spain, in 348ce, he had a career in public administration before retiring to write poetry. His major works include the Liber Cathemerinon (poems keyed to the liturgy and religious calendar), Psychomachia (an allegorical epic on the battle between Virtues and Vices for the human soul), and the Liber Peristephanon (lyric poems in praise of the early martyrs of the church). Prudentius was particularly influenced by the works of Virgil and Horace, and aimed in his poetry to combine the form and language of classical Latin poetry with the message of Christianity. The most important Christian Latin poet of late antiquity, Prudentius was extremely influential throughout the Middle Ages.

Ramus ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 216-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fran Middleton

There is increasing interest in what might be thought ‘special’ about late antique poetry. Two volumes of recent years have focused on Latin poetry of this time, Classics Renewed: Reception and Innovation in the Latin Poetry of Late Antiquity edited by Scott McGill and Joseph Pucci (2016) as well as The Poetics of Late Latin Literature edited by Jaś Elsner and Jesús Hernández Lobato (2017), while it has become increasingly acceptable to remark on late antiquity as a cultural period in its own right, rather than a point of transition between high antiquity and the middle ages. Greek poetry of late antiquity has yet to receive the level of attention offered to Latin literature of this time, and so it is to help answer the question of what may be thought special about late antique Greek poetry that I here discuss the poetics of later Greek ecphrasis.


1970 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 165-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Coats-Stephens

The article collates the textual and archaeological evidence for Rome’s water-supply in the period c.300-1000. Whilst there is now sufficient archaeological evidence for the rebuilding of the city’s aqueducts after the Gothic Wars, it is clear that the uses to which the water was put in the middle ages were very different from those of Late Antiquity. There was a massive scaling-down of the overall system, with the thermae falling immediately out of use, to be replaced to a certain extent by church baths for the clergy and poor. The Janiculum mills were maintained, and smaller watermills continued to function off the aqueducts, as well as from the Tiber. Baptisteries used both aqueduct and non-aqueduct-supplied water. There was an extensive network of wells and subterranean conduits utilizing ground-water. The system as a whole was organized centrally, by the Church – although the extent of private patronage (wells, smallscale mills and domestic baths) should not be overlooked.


2019 ◽  
Vol 109 ◽  
pp. 305-314
Author(s):  
Cillian O'Hogan

In seventh-century Wiltshire, a scholar-monk began to write classicising Latin poetry. In bold terms he describes himself as the first of the Germanic peoples to write Latin poetry (‘neminem nostrae stirpis prosapia genitum et Germanicae gentis cunabulis confotum in huiuscemodi negotio [i.e. poetry] ante nostram mediocritatem tantopere desudasse’). His programmatic statements cite Virgil explicitly, and allude to Prudentius and Sedulius. His is a poetry that sets out a stall for the beginning of something new, but does so by making clear his predecessors. For Aldhelm, as for much of the Middle Ages, the canonical models of Latin poetry included classical Latin authors as well as the Christian Latin poets of Late Antiquity.


Author(s):  
Clemens Leonhard

AbstractIn late antiquity and the middle ages, many expositors compare the liturgy of the Eucharist (or the mass/the Divine Liturgy) with the accounts of Jesus’ Last supper claiming continuity and identity for a tradition in whose early phases diversity and change were abound. This essay departs from five issues regarding aspects of change between the early Christian sympotic celebrations of the Eucharist and the state of affairs in the middle ages: first, the quantity and quality of food to be consumed; second, the combined (as against separate) blessing or consecration of bread and wine; third, the timing of the celebration in the afternoon and evening versus the early morning; fourth, its compulsory combination with a liturgy of the word that is, moreover, performed preceding the Eucharist and not following the meal as it would be customary in ancient Greece and Rome; fifth, the later reservation of the presidency to clerics of the church. At least these five aspects of change in Eucharistic celebrations can be explained with recourse to the Roman custom of patrons receiving their clients almost every morning in the framework of the morning salutatio. Thus, it is indicated how the churches of Carthage moved from Eucharistic celebrations in the style of dinner parties and communal meals towards distributions of gifts to clients at a meeting with their bishop as patron of the church. This thesis explains why the loss of prandial Eucharists began long before Constantine. It explains when and why Christian churches in the Roman Empire abandoned a celebration that lent itself to the spontaneous interpretation as a mimetic celebration of the Last Supper thus creating the need to emphasize-eventually as part of the ritual itself in the form of the recitation of institution narratives-that the Eucharist is still the same, although it lost most of its mimetic allusions to its alleged pattern in the first century. The gradual adoption of the social institution of the morning salutatio also explains the parallel existence of different forms of Eucharistic celebrations: Its adoption and adaptation is an answer to the growth of the churches in certain places which could remain unimportant for others.


Author(s):  
Olivier Guyotjeannin

This chapter examines administrative documents of the Middle Ages and the major scholarly studies of them. It surveys the number of preserved documents and the problems surrounding the lack of documents in different periods and places. The author discusses the role and influence of the Church in the increased production and preservation of documents beginning in the eleventh century, leading to an enormous increase in the production of documents during the last three centuries of the Middle Ages.


Gesta ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-52
Author(s):  
Armin F. Bergmeier

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