Converting Verse: The Poetics of Asceticism in Late Roman Gaul

For centuries, the Roman aristocracy encoded its social and cultural superiority in classical poetry. In the late Roman world, however, Christian poets--especially those in the outlying provinces of Gaul--began to experiment with poetry as a medium for exploring and asserting ascetic identities which were based on the disciplined rejection of worldly life and set in opposition to secular nobility. Converting Verse offers a new cultural history of this ascetic transformation of Latin poetry ...