Group: Julia Liu, Ann Rayburn, Wren McMillan Painting by Wren This untitled painting strives to visually represent a gruesome battle between the Virtues and the Vices in Prudentius’s Psychomachia. This battle, fought for the control of the human soul, is fraught with blood, gore, and the desecration of the body, although most of the blood loss rests on the side of the Vices. When producing this painting, I seeked not…
“It is very right for us that we should praise with words the guardian of the heavens, the glorious king of hosts, should love him in our minds.”(Anlezark, 3) The above quote functions as a thesis statement for Anlezark’s translation of Old Testament Narratives, as an absolute reverence for god pervades the text from the very start. Following the opening, the writer gives praise to God in the form…
Continuing on the thread of agency over one’s faculties of reason from the Boethius blog post, we will now apply this question to Prudentius’ Psychomachia to see if we can’t complicate the matter further.
.aoBoethius, like many other philosophers, feels the need to reason out the existence of free will in Book V of his Consolation of Philosophy. It is a natural question to come up when contemplating matters such the existence of evil amidst God’s providence. In the process though, Boethius and Lady Philosophy stumbled upon a conclusion that I think is worth exploring a bit more: “And human souls are more free…
By Clare Kemmerer, Dannie Briggs, Kaedy Puckett, and Maya Ordonez Part I: “History is what hurts” remarked Fredric Jameson; Jeffrey Hamburger, responding, asks “what could be more natural than pain?”. Pain, in the Middle Ages, was gratuitously enacted and engaged upon; physical anguish was invoked in everything from grotesque legal punishments to depictions of Hell, from monastic pious practices to gruesome artworks. Artworks from the Middle Ages present pain in…
