Helen Waddell on Prudentius: The Wandering Scholars

Helen Waddell on Prudentius: The Wandering Scholars

My first introduction to medieval Latin verse was through Helen Waddell’s “The Wandering Scholars”.   

“It is characteristic that Prudentius should begin his Book of Hours with a song for cock- crow, for the simplicity, the clarity of his verse has something of that knife-edge cleaving of the darkness. He came to poetry late, after a lifetime of law and of high office under Theodosius, the great Spanish gentleman whose life "lies like a ruined sea-wall amidst the fierce barbarian tide."  At fifty-seven, Prudentius renounced the world: entered the cloister, and with it the kingdom of heaven. He has the directness, the closeness to the object that is part of the physical necessity of childhood, and the experienced wisdom of old age.

Prudentius is not an innovator; Ambrose was before him in rhythm, Hilary in rhyme. But his verse has more of the swiftness of the lyric, less the tread of the processional chant. His Hymn for Morning is even the first aubade, though its cry is to the faithful heart, rather than to the sleeping lover. And in his Book of Martyrs he unlocks the treasure of the Golden Legend, the Lives of the Saints that Anatole France knew for the last and secret hiding place of romance. It was a long time before love captured the chansons de geste, of which the lives of the strong saints, the "Athletes of God," are the forerunners: but here it waits on the very threshold, the basket of red roses which the virgins trample under foot. The Church might decry bodily beauty, but not in the persons of its saints, and the first love scenes are the pleading of kings' sons and emperors with these fair women, vowed to the Eternal Lover”.