Laura Roesch: Envisioning the Interior: Martyrs, Place, and Sacred Violence in Late Antique Christian Poetry

My paper will explore how the late antique Christian poets Prudentius and Paulinus of Nola employ language of interiority coupled with evocations of violence to encourage audiences to envision such violence in the world around them. Probing inward into bodies and landscapes promotes Christianization of places and people through the creation of an intimate relationship between physical environment, community, and martyr. I argue that this interiority is centered on violence, as poets guide their audiences to visualize interiors directly linked to it, including wounds or prisons. This Christianizing closeness was imperative in an age when many Christians no longer had the opportunity for physical martyrdom enacted by the imperial government. In order to access their martyrial exemplars, these authors fostered intimacy through visualization of interiorized violence in particular bodies and places.
This examination illuminates how these two poets in part brought the spiritual loftiness of violent martyrdom into the physical environment. Rather than fully dematerializing landscapes, both poets cultivate a sense of intimacy between poet, audience, martyr, and physical place. Whether by delving into the martyr’s tortured body or into the landscapes of their passions, the audience gains close access to martyrial violence through envisioning the interior. In so doing, both poets facilitate historical processes of Christianization, directing their audiences to visualize deep connections to martyrs in the environment. Christianization here is not a disembodied, displaced, distant process, but one which is textually (re)enacted to encourage intimacy between late antique Christians and the envisioned landscapes of violence around them.