The Johannine Tradition in Late Antique and Medieval Poetry is a collection of essays stemming from a colloquium of the same name held in 2021 from funds of a 2019-2020 Gutenberg Chair that was awarded to Gianfranco Agosti. As is appropriate for the research interests of Prof. Agosti, the first section of the book focuses on Nonnius’s versification of the Gospel in John in Greek. The second section deals with the versification of the Bible by late antique Latin authors; and the final, which covers the medieval period, has only two essays: one on Aldhelm and another on medieval Latin hymns, liturgical texts, and dramatic poems. Most of the contributions are in French or English, with two in Italian and two in German. As such, the wide range of topics covered by very specialized essays across four different modern languages will not easily find a reader willing to read the book from cover to cover. Other readers and reviewers may find this unevenness problematic, especially since there is little of the Latin versifiers in the section on Nonnius and even less on Nonnius in the section on the Latin versifiers. For my part, I do not raise this as a point of criticism but rather a description of what has increasingly become the norm for collections of scholarly essays that first come into the world as conference papers. Specialists will only want to be aware of and use those contributions relevant to their own research, which is a perfectly normal way of doing scholarly work today. Accordingly, this review will focus less on the book as a whole in order to provide a cursory index to the scholarship presented in this volume.
The first section, entitled “Nonniana,” contains five essays concerned mainly with the poetic paraphrase of the Gospel of John by the fifth-century Greek author Nonnius. Scholarly attention on Nonnius’s paraphrase has increased over the last decades with critical editions of the individual books of the text appearing slowly but surely. Although this editorial work is not yet complete, the five essays of this section reveal how rich interpretation of Nonnius can be and will certainly encourage more scholarship on the subject. Gianfranco Agosti’s opening essay provides not only a good introduction to Nonnius but also makes a compelling argument for understanding Nonnius’s choice to paraphrase John as a reaction to contemporary Christian and pagan polemics. As Agosti gives Nonnius’s intellectual context, Arianna Rotondo’s essay turns inward to Nonnius’s versification of John by interpreting the poem as a presentation of Christian faith standing against the various groups of unbelieving opponents. The essays by Salvatore Costanza and Domenico Accorinti both give close readings of specific aspects of Nonnius’s paraphrase. Constanza interprets Nonnius’s treatment of the Resurrection in John 21 in light of post-biblical Greek literature on the event; and Accorinti compares Nonnius’s treatment of John 5:19-47 (on the relationship of the Son and the Father) with that of Juvencus, finding that Nonnius does more than Juvencus to introduce exegesis and theology into the passage. Finally, the essay by Filip Doroszewski and Maria Ypsilanti is alone in this section by foregoing Nonnius to discuss how Psalm 41:3 in theMetaphrasis Psalmorum of pseudo-Apollinaris was influenced by patristic readings of Jesus in John 6.
The second section of the volume, on late antique Christian Latin authors, consists of seven essays, most of which are concerned with Sedulius’s use of the Gospel of John for the Christology and narrative structure of the Carmen Paschale. There is some overlap among these essays, but different comparative methods and emphasis make them worthwhile on their own right. Michele Cutino focuses on the incarnational theology of books 1, 4, and 5 of Sedulius’s Carmen, with interesting insight on Sedulius’s use of a narrative break in John for his own division of books 4 and 5. Stefania Filosini gives a wider account of Sedulius’s use of all the Gospels. Donato De Gianni looks specifically at Sedulius’s use of John 21. And, lastly, Maria Dolores Hernandez examines the epilogues of books 1, 3 and 5 of theCarmen, arguing that the epilogue of book 5, which echoes the epilogue of the Gospel of John, forms a ring composition with the epilogue of book 1.
Of the essays of this section that do not deal with Sedulius, Christoph Schubert discusses the use of Revelation (which was attributed to John) in the third-century Carmen apologeticum by Commodian, alongside other sources from the Bible and Apocrypha. At the other end of the chronological scope, Luciana Furbetta and Katharina Pohl discuss the fifth- to sixth-century poets, Avitus and Arator respectively: Furbetta argues that Avitus was specifically influenced by Augustine’s commentary on John, In Iohannis euangelium tractatus; and Pohl that Arator’s account of the healing of Aeneas in Acts 9 is uniquely conflated with the healing at the pool of Bethesda in John 5.
As mentioned above, the final section, entitled “Medieval Examples,” has only two contributions on disparate subjects, which may be easily but regretfully missed by scholars not expecting to find research on Aldhelm or medieval hymnology in a book devoted mainly to Nonnius and the early Christian Latin versifiers. In the first essay of these medieval examples, Franca Ela Consolino looks at the four portrayals of John the Evangelist in Aldhelm’s works, all of which serve different purposes, ranging from basic biography to an exemplar for living a chaste life. In the second, Daniel Nodes gives an interesting account of the use of the Gospel of John in liturgical and dramatic poetry, arguing that poets dealing primarily with Matthew’s slaughter of the Innocents will often include symbols and images from the Gospel of John in order to introduce reminders of Christ’s divinity into the narrative.
The Johannine Tradition in Late Antique and Medieval Poetry gives only snapshots of very specific topics in the vast thematic and chronological subject of its title. But the contributions of the volume consist of important, scholarly research that should further understanding of biblical versification of the first millennium of Christianity in Europe. The essays it contains are not to be ignored by scholars of Nonnius, Sedulius (and other later antique Latin poets), Aldhelm, or medieval liturgical and dramatic verse.