Proba the Prophet. Studies in the Christian Virgilian Cento of Faltonia Betitia Proba

摘要

The present study aims to deepen the critical understanding of the fourth century poet FaltoniaBetita Proba’s Cento and its reception, a text of considerable historical and culturalimportance. Not only is it one of few extant Latin texts from antiquity by a woman writer, butit is also one of our oldest Christian Latin poems; it is an early example of cultural amalgamationof the Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman exegetical and literary traditions in that itis almost exclusively composed with verses from Virgil’s Aeneid, Georgics, and Eclogues, butnarrates key episodes from the Old and New Testament.The first part of the dissertation examines the various constructions of the author ‘Proba’and their relationships to the reception of the poem. It was not really until the twentiethcentury that the medieval and early modern representations of the centonist as a learnedpoet or even as a divinely inspired Sibyl were replaced by a general notion of her as a failedand scorned poet. This metamorphosis corresponds to changing attitudes to her poem ingeneral. The large number of textual testimonies from the eighth to the seventeenth century,and the predominantly positive responses to the Cento during this period, were followed byharsh condemnations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the poem ceased to beregarded as proper literature. A pessimistic narrative emerged, based on speculation ratherthan historical evidence, saying that ‘the early readers’ rejected the Cento. Strategies to ‘save’Proba were devised, and she was not seldom presented as a mother, wife and pious Christian.Despite the pervasive polyphonic and ambivalent qualities of her text, it was used as a sourceto reconstruct the feelings and intentions of the historical person Proba.Readings of this kind are further problematized in the second part of the dissertation,where a series of new interpretations of the Cento are offered. The first chapter of this partexplores the configurations of the fictive narrator, whose authorial voice is fashioned as thatof a prophet and a confessing believer in the preface, interludes and epilogue. In these ‘extradiegetic’sections of the narrative, the Virgilian verses and voices are recycled as to forma new Christian confessional and poetic language. The last two chapters explore the hermeneuticsthat characterize her use of the Virgilian and biblical texts, focusing above all on thetypological connections that are established. At one level, the Cento features reenactments ofbiblical typologies with Old Testament ‘types’ prefiguring New Testament ‘antitypes.’ But italso displays semi-biblical typologies, where characters and events from the Virgilian ‘hypotext’prefigure the biblical ones represented in the Cento, and these connections are heavilyexploited to produce foreshadowing within the narrative.