Poetic Rewriting with an Audience: Venantius Fortunatus’ Life of St Martin and the Ladies of the Abbey Sainte-Croix in Poitiers

‘Rewriting’ as the reworking of narrative material based on conscious strategies of composition plays a significant role in much of the Latin poetry of Late Antiquity. This book, resulting from the conference Riscritture poetiche nell’Occidente latino tra tarda antichità e medioevo, which was held on 9-11 May 2022 at the Department of Human Sciences (DSU) of the University of L’Aquila, looks at the range of practices and purposes that inform this procedure, with particular regard to the processes of transcodification enacted – in different historical and cultural contexts – by the recasting of authoritative prose texts into a classicising poetic idiom. The contributions present a multifaceted approach to rewriting, cover a variety of authors, genres, and texts, and cast a glance also at medieval Latin literature. In short, the essays in this collection, by reflecting on the interpretative contribution of the critical category of ‘rewriting’, not only add further tesserae to the mosaic of literary studies on Late Latinity, they also invite to grasp the difference between secular and Christian rewritings.