Define personified abstraction and give an example

One of the things that students often struggle with in reading the morality plays is the allegorical characters. Allegorical characters and personifications are actually one of the things that define the morality play.

David Bevington, in his book Medieval Drama, defines the morality play as “the dramatization of a spiritual crisis in the life of a representative mankind figure in which his spiritual struggle is portrayed as a conflict between personified abstractions representing good and evil”, and, though it does not catch all of the surviving examples, this definition is a good starting point.