Prudentius and the Poem's Afterlife in Medieval Allegory

Prudentius, full name Aurelius Prudentius Clemens, was a Latin Christian poet born in 348 in the Roman province of Hispania who was still alive after 405, the presumed range for the Psychomachia's composition, making it a work of his later years rather than an early exercise. Its influence on medieval literature and art is difficult to overstate. Manuscript copies of the poem were frequently illustrated, and those illustrations, showing personified virtues in Roman armor fighting personified vices, established a visual vocabulary for allegorical combat that recurs across medieval art, from cathedral sculpture programs pairing named virtues and vices on opposing sides of a portal to painted cycles in later centuries. As a literary model, the poem stands behind the whole later medieval tradition of staging moral conflict through personified abstractions, including works such as the Romance of the Rose in France and Piers Plowman in England, both of which return to a technique the Psychomachia had already worked out roughly eight hundred years earlier as narrative poetry in its own right rather than as commentary or treatise. Its own title supplied later criticism with the word psychomachia as the name for this kind of inner battle allegory wherever it recurs afterward, an unusual case of a single poem naming the entire genre it founded.