E. V. Mulhern: Militia Christi: Warrior Virtues, Virgin Martyrs, and the Feminine in Prudentius

This paper aims to explicate the interaction of gender, Romanness, and Christian virtue in Prudentius, especially the Liber Peristephanon and the Psychomachia. In Prudentius’ time, the literature of Christian Rome has altered the Roman conception of virtue. Traditional virtues are directed into Christian channels: fides is still lauded, but the fides of St. Lawrence is not Regulus’. The militant virtues, previously gendered male, are now open to women who fight for Christ; the quieter virtues of humility are now available to the male servants of Christ as to the female. Prudentius’ virgin martyrs both elide and foreground this shift. Their warrior-like courage is ostensibly as admirable as that of their male counterparts, but the poet rarely misses a chance to emphasize the incongruity, as of Eulalia in Peristephanon iii.35: feminaprovocat arma virum. In his Psychomachia, seven personified Vices do battle with seven Virtues. These abstractions are grammatically and therefore physically feminine, yet they are armed and they fight. As Prudentius negotiates this difficulty, he must also differentiate between a good armed woman and a bad, addingnew divisions of Christian, pagan, and heretic to centuries-old stereotypes of gendered and Orientalizing hierarchies. The Vices are dressed in elaborate, eastern armor, while the Virtues are simply garbed, following on long-standing poetic standards of Roman womanhood. These two texts will illuminate Prudentius’ attempt to construct a new, ideal Christian feminine out of the pagan traditions of literary Roman femininity.