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MASTRANGELO, M., The Roman Self in Late Antiquity. Prudentius and the Poetcs of the Soul. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2008. VIII,259p. Pencil markings, underlinings and a few annotations. Original gilt titled burgundy cloth with dust wrps. ‘Over the past fifty years, several studies have stressed Prudential’ Christian remodelling of traditional Roman culture, through the polemic of his Contra Symmachus, the use of Roman civic language and terminology in the martyr-poems (Peristephanon), and the complex allusiveness to (above all!) Virgil in his poems generally. Marc Mastrangelo takes the argument simnifically further, identifying a fusion of Roman poetry and Christianity in Prudentius, and a grand narrative of Roman christian identity-construction, with strong contemporary application to the late fourth-century empire of Theodosius I, in the one poem of his generally assumed to lack a historical dimension, the allegorical battle between virtues and vices in (or of) the soul (Psychomachia). M. applies modern critical and cultural analysis, and is particularly influenced by Lyotard’s and later critics’ work on the historical-cultural function of narrative; but his principal debt is to John D. Dawson’s complex study of Jewish-Christian biblical interpretation, Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity (2002). (…). M.’s first chapter examines Virginian intertexts in Psych. (…) M. goes further, advancing a novel explanation of P.’s use of allusiveness; it is part of a project to create a new epic, at once roman and Christian. (…) The complementary chapters 2 and 3 are the most convincing of the book. Ch. 2 examines aspects of P.’s treatment of Roman and Christian history, and the influence of biblical narrative (…) upon it. Typologies play a central role here, and M. shows how Roman history is used, as well as the Jewish-Christian Bible. (…). Ch. 3 extends the range of discussion of the function of typology, to embrace aspects (moral, epistemological, theological) (…). M. brings out well the role of the language of narrative theology in the development of several typologies in Psych. Here the focus is on the poem’s argument as addressed to the individual, and the role of the reader’s faith in predisposing her to understand the meanings that P., like a biblical prophet, reveals. But the poet-prophet does not stand in a hierarchical relation to the reader: poet and reader are equivalent searchers after meaning (…). Less satisfactory is the attempt of ch. 4 to find specific philosophical, especially Neoplatonist influences in Psych., and some other poems. (…) In his conclusion M. applies Christopher Gill’s distinction between a relational and an individualist concept of the self to clarify P.’s concept, which he understands to combine both aspects: the soul is related to God and other humans, but also has free will. This underpins the new identity-construct, at once imperial Roman and radical Christian (….). The great merit of this sophisticated study is to provoke debate about P.’s originality and subtlety.’ (GERARD J.P. O’DALY in The Journal of Roman Studies, 2009, 302-304). € 15.00 (Antiquarian) ISBN: 9780801887222