The double entendres of this volume's title and sub-title are programmatic: Prudentius, Anthony Dykes argues, asks readers of the Hamartigenia to negotiate the subtle allusions, generic slippage, and architectural maze of this poem in order to train themselves to read (and redress) the foul mutations written into the created order by a sinful humanity; the “vocation” of Prudentius's readers, therefore, includes a summons to be responsible moral agents as well as savants of Latin poetry. It is Dykes's own reading of the Hamartigenia as both a “splendid poem” (16) and a theological discourse that gives this study its attractiveness. Prudentian poetics have been on the ascent for some time; more recently, with books like Marc Mastrangelo's The Roman Self in Late Antiquity: Prudentius and the Poetics of the Soul (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2008), the poet's engagement with the intellectual and theological issues of his day is coming more clearly into view. Dykes's assessment of the Hamartigenia builds another bridge between the literary and theological by asserting that one form of responsible “reading” demanded by the poet—“dutiful and scrupulous” literary assessment of the poem—modeled reading of the far more crucial “text of the world” itself (24). Landscapes, textual, moral, and natural, are the bedrock of this book; alert and responsible reading is the vehicle the late antique poet offered (and the author tunes up) for traveling through them.

Like his contemporary Augustine (surprisingly little present here), Prudentius grappled with the fundamental problem of explaining the presence of evil in a world created by a beneficent God and found his answers not in dualist theologies—hence the poem's putative adversary Marcion—or in divine impotence but in the willful error of humans (mala moralia). Nevertheless, in Prudentius's estimation the effects of sin, particularly those associated with transgressions of gender boundaries, have leaked through the boundaries of moral failure to distort and diminish the natural order (mala physica). It is particularly this aspect of Prudentius's poem, Dykes contends, that sets it apart from other ruminations of the age. In a sense, then, the real text of the Hamartigenia is the palimpsest of the natural world, created good, mutilated by the “original sin” of Adam and Eve, and ever more traumatized by the “actual sin” of subsequent generations. The intertextual indeterminacies and generic ambiguities of the Hamartigenia are therefore intentional; the Hamartigenia is a purposefully difficult poem. Its generic oscillations and inversions (satirical-didactic-pastoral), like its allusive complexity and multiplicity of interpretive frames (for example, 95–101), are strategic maneuvers by which Prudentius at once destabilized readers and placed upon their shoulders responsibility for determining how his poem should be read. Responsible reading, that is, generates responsible moral agents. Forced to make literary choices, the reader of the Harmartigenia is led to make moral ones as well; trained to read responsibly Prudentius's reader is called to remake a disjointed world.

An introductory chapter submits these claims. Three further chapters refine and support the argument. The first establishes Prudentius's belief in the unmitigated power of the human will, even in its post-lapsarian state; models a close reading of the poem's fratres gemini “panel” (ll. 789–801) as an exemplum of the literary and moral decisions with which Prudentius constantly confronts his readers as well as his characters; and argues for the presence of sinful erotic, homo-erotic, and gender-bending overtones, introduced in the opening line of the preface and expanded in the episode of the flight of Loth's wife from Sodom, but present throughout. The next chapter assesses the real dangers of disorientation and aporia posed by the multiplicity of poetic intertexts thrust into play by Prudentius in any given episode and argues that the poet stages escape to stability by urging his readers' recourse to the Bible, the only text “the Hamartigenia asks us to check” (103). And yet, Dykes argues that this hermeneutical reassurance will not come through “unreflective reliance on the scriptural text as a support” (172). In keeping with the poet's aim to create responsible readers, that is, Prudentius's contractions, expansions, and manipulations of Biblical exemplars and his typological machinations even here force his readers to make choices, denying them simple linear genealogies. Perhaps only in his insistence that readers acknowledge the inseparability of the two Testaments, a counter to dualist arguments, does Prudentius take a firm stand, but even then the poet leaves open manifold and intertwined pathways for the reader to wander the scriptural landscape: the journey is more valuable than the destination. In his final chapter, Dykes extends this argument to the examination of what he calls “generic metathesis,” that is, the poet's determination to the deny the reader certainty about the generic affiliation of the Hamartigenia by constantly substituting one set of generic markers (for instance, didactic) for another (for example, satiric). The reader, forced to make complex literary-critical choices at every step, is “made acutely aware of the power of choice to affect the world” (180).

Reading Sin, like the Hamartigenia itself, is not a book “for the dilettante” (29) and, like Prudentius, Dykes “expects much of his reader” (73). Dykes is himself clever and learned and requires we be in turn. He will not need to persuade many that Prudentius is a serious poet; nevertheless his study reveals underappreciated dimensions of Prudentius's verbal artistry—particularly the poet's deployment of generic ambiguity in the service of his theological as well as literary aims. Not every reading here will convince every reader, and that is to be expected in a study as ambitious as this one. More important—because it is the core of his argument—is the question of whether the responsibility that Dykes's Prudentius demands of his readers extends beyond the literary-critical register expected of the knowing reader to embrace the thorny realms of moral choice. Dykes has made a strong case for thinking that Prudentius calls upon his readers not only to make sense of his poem but also to respond to a disordered world.