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The Baptized Muse - Early Christian Poetry as Cultural Authority (Hardcover)
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The Baptized Muse - Early Christian Poetry as Cultural Authority (Hardcover)
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This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC
BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford
Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and
selected open access locations. With the rise of Christianity in
the Roman Empire increasing numbers of educated people converted to
this new belief. As Christianity did not have its own educational
institutions the issue of how to harmonize pagan education and
Christian convictions became increasingly pressing. Especially
classical poetry, the staple diet of pagan education, was
considered to be morally corrupting (due to its deceitful
mythological content) and damaging for the salvation of the soul
(because of the false gods it advocated). But Christianity recoiled
from an unqualified anti-intellectual attitude, while at the same
time the experiment of creating an idiosyncratic form of genuinely
Christian poetry failed (the sole exception being the poet
Commodianus). In The Baptized Muse: Early Christian Poetry as
Cultural Authority, Karla Pollmann argues that, instead, Christian
poets made creative use of the classical literary tradition, and-in
addition to blending it with Judaeo-Christian biblical
exegesis-exploited poetry's special ability of enhancing
communicative effectiveness and impact through aesthetic means.
Pollman explores these strategies through a close analysis of a
wide range of Christian, and for comparison partly also pagan,
writers mainly from the fourth to sixth centuries. She reveals that
early Christianity was not a hermetically sealed uniform body, but
displays a rich spectrum of possibilities in dealing with the past
and a willingness to engage with and adapt the surrounding
culture(s), thereby developing diverse and changing responses to
historical challenges. By demonstrating throughout that authority
is a key in understanding the long denigrated and misunderstood
early Christian poets, this book reaches the ground-breaking
conclusion that early Christian poetry is an art form that gains
its justification by adding cultural authority to Christianity.
Thus, in a wider sense it engages with the recently developed
interdisciplinary scholarly interest in aspects of religion as
cultural phenomena.
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