Psychomachia

Psychomachia is the late antique Latin allegorical poem of the Christian Roman poet Prudentius, staging the virtues in armed battle against the vices for possession of the human soul. As Prudentius's own primary text it is the correct source for the content and imagery of this specific allegorical tradition, which became enormously influential on later medieval Christian art and literature depicting personified virtues and vices in conflict. Its limit is that it is a work of Latin poetry from a specific late Roman Christian context, not a theological treatise or a historical account of how virtue and vice were popularly understood, so a claim about wider medieval moral theology beyond this poem's own allegorical framework needs a different kind of source.