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Martyr Texts and Cults

Until recently, Prudentian scholarship in English tended to concentrate on the Psychomachia; but now the Liber Peristephanon is on view as well. Following upon Anne-Marie Palmer's Prudentius on the Martyrs (Oxford, 1989) and Martha Malamud's A Poetics of Transformation: Prudentius and Classical Mythology (Ithaca, New York, 1989), R.'s innovative project is to place Prudentius' collection of poems about martyrs in its fourth-century cultural context, and to show how it operates within its own literary context by studying ' the thematic structures of the specific poems under discussion and of the collection as a whole' (pp. 3-4). R. proposes to investigate first the relation between 'martyr text' and 'martyr cult', i.e. the embodiment of beliefs and practices of the cult of the martyrs in the texts, and then the 'poetics of the martyr text' (p. 7). His program in ch. 1 is to relate the poems of the Liber Peristephanon to the growth of martyr cults in the fourth century; in ch. 2, to establish the tripartite typology of the 'Prudentian martyr text'; in chs 3 and 4 to analyse specific poems, especially in terms of metaphor and themes; in ch. 5, to reveal Prudentius' synoptic view of the martyr cult in the pilgrimage poems of the collection (pp. 7-8).