H. argues that Prudentius ‘initially directed his work to an audience located in Hispania’ and ‘in southern Gaul’ (pp. 1, 3) The Spanish audience ‘may have been indifferent to the Christian aspects of his verses’ (p. 215), but, as a ‘villa-poet’, Prudentius’ layman status brought his poetry to a Spanish elite whose social and political life revolved around grand villas and who were receptive to classical and literary sophistication without the ecclesiastical imprimatur (p. 215).

Methodologically, H. seeks to localise Prudentius, imagining a poet who was well known in the provincial cities of Tarraco, Caesaraugusta, Prudentius’ home of Calagurris as well as towns in between. According to H., Prudentius belonged to the Christian community of Calagurris and is sincere when he claims himself to be of modest wealth, certainly not enough to be a member of the local Christian elite, which included the top clerics. To achieve this picture of Prudentius, H. utilises both well-trodden and neglected literary sources (pp. 27–8) as well as recent archaeological and historical work of Spanish scholars, the latter a needed corrective to what she sees as Classical scholarship's hyper-Romanisation (or nationalising) of the poet. For instance, H. denies that Prudentius was a fixture at the imperial court in Milan, preferring to point to Jerome's non-mention of Prudentius (p. 16) as well as Prudentius’ own silence on his position in the imperial administration (implying that he had no position; see also p. 22) as evidence of his provincial-ness. Indeed, H. proclaims that her project ‘has not been approached from the point of view of the classicist’ (p. 4), in other words, merely through literary sources. Given H.’s claim to ‘unif[y] the differing disciplines of history, archaeology, literature, and art history’ (frontispiece, p. i), her main contribution lies in the interpretation of the material culture of late-antique Hispania to determine Prudentius’ audience and purpose in writing.

H.’s arguments serve to detach Spain and Prudentius from the Theodosian court in order to recalibrate the reception of the poet as attempting to bring Christianity to a learned audience of nominal and uncommitted Spanish Christians. The lack of material for Christian churches (p. 27) and visual evidence for Christian imagery in fourth-century Spain leads H. to posit Prudentius as a gifted Christian artist whose Peristephanon (as well as other works) attempted to promote martyr worship and Nicean orthodoxy rather than being a reflection of an already present audience for martyr worship and an entrenched orthodoxy in late fourth-/early fifth-century Spain.

The first chapter develops a picture of an elite who lived in rural villas or ran local governments from their urban domus. Their shared culture of the Classical inheritance made them an apt audience for Prudentius’ erudite and dynamic poetry. Military insignia with the head of a Medusa found in the small town of Vareia along the Ebro river, but made in Cologne, suggests a member of the elite who served in the imperial court (like Prudentius might have) or in the army and would be a typical example of Prudentius’ audience. The lack of evidence for Christian burial practices in the Spanish countryside (pp. 62–4), the small number of Christian bishops in Spain (p. 55) and the evidence for non-Christian cultic activities near Calagurris indicating taurobolic or Magna Mater rites (pp. 58–61), all point to the conclusion that ‘villa-based communities in the fourth and early fifth centuries continued to exist in a “pagan”, non-Christian, rural environment’ (p. 62).

There is much to appreciate in this approach. H. succeeds in enriching our view of Prudentius by seeing him as a regional poet whose wider literary prominence in subsequent literary history should be understood in the context of his original, local purpose: ‘to praise the Christian God and to spread His message to an audience centred in the poet's Spanish homeland, and probably adjacent Southern Gaul’ (p. 8). Prudentius intended his poetry ‘as a means of converting the unconverted to Christ and strengthening the half-hearted believers’ (p. 38) and ‘as a means by which Christianity could be brought to a rural audience not in regular contact with the senior levels of the church hierarchy’ (p. 69). Prudentius, then, is not primarily a Roman poet writing for the Roman elite or for immortality in the Roman literary tradition.

This conclusion and H.’s implication of Prudentius and Ausonius as villa-poets (p. 43 and n. 50) beg a more theoretical question concerning the terms villa-poet and Roman poet. Roman poets are creatures of their local backgrounds and geographies, going back to Catullus, but they also take part in a broader discourse concerning Roman identity, literary predecessors, mythical tradition, and religious and philosophical ideologies. Taken as a whole, Prudentius’ corpus participates in both the local and broad literary discourses. His focus in the Peristephanon on both Roman and Spanish saints, as well as on Rome and Spanish cities, shows his ability to capture both discourses, elevating the local to the national and in turn seeing the national from a local perspective. H. briefly alludes to a similar idea when she says that Prudentius does not mention Vincent's Spanish connection in Peristephanon 5 ‘in order to universalise him’ as a Christian hero (p. 92 n. 87).

In Chapter 3, H. takes up the Peristephanon’s relationship to martyr worship in Spain. Taking her cue from P. Brown, H. argues that Prudentius was introducing the martyr cult into Hispania, making available these stories in sophisticated poetry to the villa-dwelling aristocracy. Prudentius’ poetry is an activist attempt to popularise martyr cult there. While there is some evidence for pre-Prudentian writing on martyrs in Spain in the writings of Priscillian and Potamius (pp. 101–2), Prudentius remains a towering figure for the spread of the martyr cult through literature during this period. H. attempts to confirm this in the material record, even though it is frustratingly complicated and out of sync with the literary evidence. Nonetheless, H. is able to conclude that Prudentius indeed was a pioneer for introducing the cult of the martyrs in Spain (pp. 120–2).

H.’s analysis of Perist. 9 (Cassian) and Perist. 11 (Hippolytus) as ekphrases of paintings/mosaics in Rome sometimes gets bogged down in whether or not Prudentius had actually seen the paintings – to which she concludes that he did (see H.’s useful appendix on mosaics and Prudentius’ poems). H. argues that the catacomb art of Rome provided Prudentius with the fundamental pictures he describes in words for his audience in Hispania. She reaches this conclusion through examining ‘what Prudentius might possibly have seen in Italy’ (p. 148). In addition, H. dives deep into Prudentius’ technique of ekphrasis, recalling the grammarians Quintilian and Nikolaos (p. 143), but effectively implying a comparison of Prudentius’ use of ekphrasis to Greek writers such as Philostratus (p. 145), whose portrayal of the pagan Hippolytus’ death influenced Prudentius’ depiction of the Christian martyr Hippolytus’ death.

Chapter 5 further constructs an aesthetic context that engages Prudentius’ work with mosaics, sarcophagi, insignia, paintings and statuary. This engagement with the material evidence is provocative and useful, and speculative – not necessarily a bad thing, for instance, when H. attempts to tease out how Prudentius’ audience might have made the leap from pagan to Christian interpretation of newly arriving Christian iconography and poetry.

H.’s approach leads to unsurprising literary conclusions that Prudentius composed ‘socially and intellectually acceptable’ poetry for an audience (p. 215) that expected Classical models and content, and that Prudentius was successful in spreading his faith in the ‘post-Roman world’ (p. 218). Nevertheless, H.’s attempt to characterise Prudentius’ audience and Prudentius’ experience of the visual culture of the fourth century is the most ambitious part of the book. While some of H.’s conclusions remain speculative and in need of further elaboration, her use of artistic and architectural evidence further clarifies the parameters for understanding the context of Prudentius’ poetry, and compels further work on the relationship between Prudentius the Roman poet and Prudentius the Spanish poet.