Layered lines, juxtaposed colours, glittering details set against the background: the cover of this volume offers a fitting visual metaphor for its subject, Michael Roberts’s notion of the jewelled style in late antique poetry. In The Jeweled Style (1989), Roberts identified a cluster of tendencies that together defined a late antique poetics: visual richness, variation within patterns, episodic structure, dense classical and Christian intertextuality, and an organisation that privileges detail over totality, like a mosaic. He insisted that this style should be read on its own terms rather than judged by classical standards, and rejected the idea of a fully separate Christian style. Subsequent scholarship has refined or challenged his model, most notably Philip Hardie’s emphasis on continuity between early imperial and late antique poetry and his reformulation of the mosaic metaphor as ‘composite togetherness’ rather than fragmentation.
Like the style it studies — and like its cover — this volume offers a multifaceted reconsideration of late antique poetics. Emerging from discussions marking thirty years of engagement with Roberts’s work, including panels at the 2019 SCS meeting and the 2021 conference The Jeweled Style Revisited (Erlangen, online), it expands and tests his findings from multiple angles. Contributors address genres marginal in Roberts’s original study, explore prose, focus on specific devices (lists, digressions, metaphors), reconsider Christian negotiations with jewelled poetics, and widen the lens to the Greek world and the reception of late antique texts. The editors describe the approach as a ‘re-wilding’, a term borrowed from Monbiot’s ecosystem studies: instead of imposing a single perspective, they let research follow its course.
The seventeen chapters are divided into two parts. Part I, labelled ‘formalist’, concentrates on patterns associated with the jewelled style, treating them as separable from their context and thus confirming or destabilising Roberts’ periodisation. Part II approaches jewelled features as an expression of late antique aesthetics, emphasising the interaction of form and meaning/context. On the editors’ admission, however, the boundary blurs: some essays in Part I treat cultural factors (education), and essays in Part II engage closely with formal organisation (epigrammatic sequences). This overlap suggests a central question that calls for further clarification: to what extent can form and context be meaningfully separated?
Part I opens with Ian Fielding’s exploration of the prehistory of the jewel metaphor, tracing it back to Huysmans’ À rebours, where polychromy, jewel-obsession and cultural hybridity are considered value-producing rather than decadent. Subsequent essays examine how specific genres and languages contain or omit jewelled features. Fotini Hadjittofi shows that such traits appear first in third-century Greek prose and only later in fifth-century poetry, remaining absent from Greek biblical epic. She distinguishes between repetition or sound patterning and more diagnostic markers such as heightened visuality and paradox, insisting on attention to levels of meaning in identifying the style. Catherine Ware identifies jewelled elements in prose panegyric before their appearance in poetry and outlines criteria for jewelled prose. Frances Foster examines educational practices visible in Ausonius and Servius. She argues that training in lexical variation, colour symbolism and segmented composition could shape the elite’s expectation for jewelled writing. A methodological innovation comes from Joshua Hartman and Jacob Levernier’s quantitative NLP analysis of enumeration and congeries. Their findings confirm the concentration of these features in the fourth century, link them with specific models, and highlight the distinctiveness of biblical epic. Ruth Parkes connects late antique lists and catalogues with Silver Latin precedents, but encourages us to shift attention to their function, showing how they anticipate developments and signal intertextuality. Cillian O’Hogan traces the afterlife of jewelled techniques — genre fluidity, colour juxtaposition, paradoxical encomium — into early medieval Latin poetry. Helen Kaufmann challenges the association of jewelled style with fragmentation: drawing on Horace’s account of unity in Ars Poetica and recalling Hardie’s concordia discors, she proposes a model of ‘constructed coherence through variety’, and questions whether such compositional strategies are inherently late antique.
In Part II, the approach turns more explicitly to the relationship between style and meaning. Christoph Schubert explores layered, compounded metaphors, whose semantic density creates jewel-like brilliance. Several essays investigate Christian negotiations with jewelled poetics. Jesús Hernández Lobato presents Augustine’s Confessions as an un-jewelled alternative — poetic prose rooted in the Psalms. David Ungvary analyses Jerome’s critique of the cento’s ‘patchwork technique’, revealing Christian unease with extreme intertextual fragmentation that risks distorting the ‘original meaning’ of the hypo-texts. By contrast, Francesco Lubian and Elena Castelnuovo identify jewelled structures in Zeno of Verona’s homiletic ekphrases and Dracontius, arguing against a rigid division between Christian and non-Christian aesthetics and showing convergence between biblical and jewelled elements. Scott McGill examines the thematic ‘strings of jewels’ created by recurring Virgilian episodes in Christian centos, especially the reworking of the Fourth Eclogue. Carole Newlands shows how Fortunatus adapts Statius’ architectural ekphrasis to privilege spiritual meaning over material description, avoiding descriptions of jewels and focusing on light without a source, and aligning with Merovingian visual culture. Bret Mulligan’s chapter introduces jewelled features in epigrams — seriality, multifocality, material focus — alongside mechanisms of coherence within epigrammatic clusters, like shared themes. Finally, Andreas Abele suggests that Macrobius and Symmachus’ style and text arrangement reflects a Neoplatonic idea of ‘unity-in-multiplicity’, before a reflective epilogue by Roberts himself.
Amid this range of perspectives, questions about the relationship between form and meaning, coherence and fragmentation, and the function of jewelled patterns emerge with frequency. Essays by Parkes, McGill, and Mulligan, for example, show that coherence often arises from semantic associations and symbolic meaning. Kaufmann and Abele go further, showing that coherence and fragmentation imply rather than exclude one another, even from a formal viewpoint. Together, these studies satisfy Roberts’s suggestion to locate coherence at higher levels of meaning and to reconsider the conventional definition of ‘unity’ (1989: 33 n. 45). Tangentially, the collection also calls for clearer theorisation of meaning at different levels — grammatical, literal, symbolic, emotional — when defining what constitutes a jewelled style. Some essays demonstrate that devices like sound patterning or a generic notion of ‘repetition’ are insufficient. Others stress the importance of symbolic meaning and message in shaping the style of certain Christian authors, including a use of visuality that might not always coincide with generic ‘polychromy’.
Comparisons with Greek literature and with cultural spheres like philosophy, art, or education prompt further reflection on how far style is shaped by cultural forces and whether shared settings produce comparable stylistic tendencies. These discussions also inevitably return to the issue of periodisation. Some contributors question whether jewelled features define a late antique style; others emphasise their distinctiveness or increased use in this period. If the issue is to be pursued, progress may depend on identifying the most decisive devices — patterns of line structure, semantically charged elements like polychromy or digressions? — and on assessing how densely they appear in late antique compared with earlier literature, an area where quantitative methods offer promising tools. Finally, closer analysis of the backgrounds of Christian poetry might further clarify the question of a Christian style, which the volume confirms as a phenomenon that resists any single interpretation.
In conclusion, the volume fulfils its promise as a powerful stimulus that, by revisiting Roberts’s insights while opening new methodological paths, encourages a more precise understanding of how late antique authors constructed meaning individually and within their cultural environments.
