Literature[edit]

The "Queen of Fortune", helped by four other personifications, turns her wheel. English miniature for John
Lydgate's Troy Book, 15th-century.

According to Andrew Escobedo, “literary personification mashalls inanimate things, such as

passions, abstract ideas, and rivers, and makes them perform actions in the landscape of the
narrative.”[28] He dates “the rise and fall of its [personification’s] literary popularity” to "roughly,
between the fifth and seventeenth centuries". [29] Late antique philosophical books that made
heavy use of personification and were specially influential in the Middle Ages included
the Psychomachia of Prudentius (early 5th century), with an elaborate plot centred around battles
between the virtues and vices,[30] and The Consolation of Philosophy (c. 524) by Boethius, which
takes the form of a dialogue between the author and "Lady Philosophy". Fortuna and the Wheel
of Fortune were prominent and memorable in this, which helped to make the latter a favourite
medieval trope.[31] Both authors were Christians, and the origins in the pagan classical religions of
the standard range of personifications had been left well behind.
A medieval creation was the Four Daughters of God, a shortened group of virtues consisting of:
Truth, Righteousness or Justice, Mercy, and Peace. There were also the seven virtues, made up
of the four classical cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance and courage (or fortitude),
these going back to Plato's Republic, with the three theological virtues of faith, hope and charity.
The seven deadly sins were their counterparts.[32]

Two of the triumphal cars, carrying Chastity and Love, from a lavish illuminated manuscript (early 16th
century) of Petrach's Triomphi

The major works of Middle English literature had many personification characters, and often
formed what are called "personification allegories" where the whole work is an allegory, largely
driven by personifications. These include Piers Plowman by William Langland ( c. 1370–90),
where most of the characters are clear personifications named as their qualities, [33] and several
works by Geoffrey Chaucer, such as The House of Fame (1379–80). However, Chaucer tends to
take his personifications in the direction of being more complex characters and give them
different names, as when he adapts part of the French Roman de la Rose (13th century). The
English mystery plays and the later morality plays have many personifications as characters,
alongside their biblical figures. Frau Minne, the spirit of courtly love in German medieval
literature, had equivalents in other vernaculars.
In Italian literature Petrach's Triomphi, finished in 1374, is based around a procession of
personifications carried on "cars", as was becoming fashionable in courtly festivities; it was
illustrated by many different artists.[34] Dante has several personification characters, but prefers
using real persons to represent most sins and virtues. [35]
In Elizabethan literature many of the characters in Edmund Spenser's enormous epic The Faerie
Queene, though given different names, are effectively personifications, especially of virtues.
[36]
 The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) by John Bunyan was the last great personification allegory in
English literature, from a strongly Protestant position (though see Thomson's Liberty below). A
work like Shelley's The Triumph of Life, unfinished at his death in 1822, which to many earlier
writers would have called for personifications to be included, avoids them, as does most
Romantic literature,[37] apart from that of William Blake.[38] Leading critics had begun to complain
about personification in the 18th century, and such "complaints only grow louder in the
nineteenth century".[39] According to Andrew Escobedo, there is now "an unstated scholarly
consensus" that "personification is a kind of frozen or hollow version of literal characters", which
"depletes the fiction".[40]