Overview

For well over a thousand years, from its composition in the early fifth century, the Psychomachia, the great allegory of moral strife within the divided soul by Latin poet Prudentius, remained a fountainhead of poetic and artistic inspiration—Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton all were touched and deeply influenced by it; countless images from wall paintings, manuscripts, sculptures, and stained glass reflected its scenes of violent struggle between personified virtues and vices. In a lucid and fast-moving English translation, SoulStrife makes this poem available to a contemporary audience. The text is generously annotated and accompanied by more than fifty illustrations from manuscripts dating from the ninth through the thirteenth centuries. An introduction by Sara Ahbel-Rappe details the poem’s context in the great inward turn of Christianity and the Hesychast movement of the late fourth century that set inner peace and the stillness of prayer in the foreground of human endeavors.

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William Levitan is professor emeritus of classics at Grand Valley State University and a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.

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