Time: 6:30pmVenue: David Sizer Lecture Theatre, Francis Bancroft Building
Supercilious litterateurs never tire of ridiculing him, but Prudentius’s late fourth century allegory of warfare between vices and virtues established a genre that endured for a thousand years, and that offered sophisticated new insights into the interior and outward constitution of the self. This agonistic self, founded in images of division and struggle which resonate with Freudian psychology and other more contemporary theories of mind, will be pursed in writings by Philo of Alexandria, Prudentius's Psychomachia, and both versions of the Roman de la Rose.