The Poetics of Asceticism in Late Roman Gaul

For centuries, the Roman aristocracy encoded its social and cultural superiority in classical poetry. In the late Roman world, however, Christian poets--especially those in the outlying provinces of Gaul--began to experiment with poetry as a medium for exploring and asserting ascetic identities which were based on the disciplined rejection of worldly life and set in opposition to secular nobility.

Converting Verse offers a new cultural history of this ascetic transformation of Latin poetry and fortifies our understanding of the Christianization of Roman culture in Late Antiquity. It provides a fresh account of the ways Gallo-Roman Christian poets composed verse amid barbarian incursions, the rise of monasticism, and the collapse of the Western Roman Empire itself, showing how they responded to cultural instability with literary performances of spiritual discipline and religious reform. Through the fifth century, these poets--Paulinus of Nola, Paulinus of Pella, Sidonius Apollinaris, and Avitus of Vienne, among others--wrote poetry that urged and expressed the recalibration of traditional dynamics between literature and identity in the Roman world, and in the process reinvented Latin poetry’s power and purpose.

Drawing on critical insights from classical studies, religious studies, and literary theory, David Ungvary argues that the significance of Christian poetic experimentation was not restricted to the aesthetic domain but had profound social and cultural implications as well. In the unsettled world of late Roman Gaul, Christian verse writing produced strategies and practices of authorship, religious conversion, and Christianization that informed the emergent cultures of the post-Roman West.

David Ungvary is Assistant Professor of Classics at Bard College.