In Proba the Prophet: The Christian Virgilian Cento of Faltonia Betitia Proba Sigrid Schottenius Cullhed offers an in-depth study and reappraisal of the Cento of Proba and its reception. Proba's poem belongs to the few extant Latin texts from Antiquity penned by a woman writer, and one of the oldest Christian Latin poems. Schottenius Cullhed surveys and challenges common preconceptions and biographical constructions of the poem's author and early readers, and examines their impact on interpretations and evaluations of the text. The author also develops and puts to use an...

This first monograph in English on Colluthus situates this late antique author within his cultural context and offers a new appraisal of his hexameter poem The Abduction of Helen, the end-point of the pagan Greek epic tradition, which was composed in the Christianised Egyptian Thebaid. The book evaluates the poem's connections with long-established and contemporary literary and artistic genres and with Neoplatonic philosophy, and analyzes the poet's re-negotiation of traditional material to suit the expectations of a late fifth-century AD audience. It explores Colluthus' interpretation...

Gregory of Tours hoped to inspire the believers in sixth-century Gaul with examples of righteous and wicked deeds and their consequences. Critiquing his own society, Gregory contrasted vengeful queens, rebellious nuns, and conniving witches with pious widows, humble abbesses, and tearful saints. By examining his thematic treatment of topics including widowhood, marriage, sanctity, authority, and political agency, Queens, Consorts, Concubines reassesses the material shaped by such concerns, including e.g. Gregory's accounts of Brunhild, Fredegund, Radegund, and other important elite...

Direct Speech in Nonnus' Dionysiaca is the first more extensive study of the use and functions of direct speech in Nonnus' Dionysiaca (5th century AD). Its long soliloquies and scarcity of dialogues have often been pointed out as striking characteristics of Nonnus' epic style, but nonetheless this fascinating subject received relatively little attention. Berenice Verhelst aims to reveal the poem's constant interplay between the epic tradition and the late antique literary context with its clear rhetorical stamp. She focusses on the changed functions of direct speech and their...

Rhetorical Strategies in Late Antique Literature: Images, Metatexts and Interpretation is a collection of essays that survey the rhetorical tropes and the metaliterary dimension of works by important authors such as Eusebius of Caesarea, Methodius, Gregory of Nazianzus, Nonnus and the emperor Julian in a period marked by intense and thriving contact between Classical paideia and Christian culture. Building on recent interpretations of the late antique cultural landscape as a milieu in which our understanding of religious dichotomies such as pagan vs. Christian requires a more...