This monograph, the first in an ambitious new series on late-antique literature, is a challenging and wide-ranging new approach to the poetess Proba and her cento, written by an enthusiast who believes that Proba has been misunderstood as well as underestimated. S.C. has a wide knowledge of the manuscripts (those named take up nearly half of her small index) and of various aspects of the reception, a topic central to her study. She has read very widely, providing a large bibliography, and many footnotes are filled with lists of references – sometimes, indeed, verging on the indigestible; on the words vatis Proba from line 12, which provide her title, she has referenced some seventeen modern works in support of the familiar interpretation, with two against. In the introduction she clearly sets out the shape of the monograph and explains key elements of her methodology: author, reception, genre, intertextuality, hypotext and hypertext, and typology. The text of the cento, and an English translation, are given, together with Virgilian references, in the appendix.
Chapter 1, ‘Proba the Poet’, begins by pointing out the significance of Proba's ‘onymity’ (Genette); by mentioning her name Proba breaks with the conventions of epic, in a way that recalls the intimacy of lyric or elegy. S.C. goes on to examine various ways in which, for better or worse, this datum has been exploited. Four pages discuss the claims made for Faltonia Betitia Proba or her granddaughter Anicia Faltonia Proba, with a quick summary of some of the issues. S.C. goes with the majority (she lists nineteen views in a footnote without giving an Ariadne's thread – it would be a long one – or trying to show which ones are purely derivative), but as if embarrassed at having to choose at all, and apparently distancing herself from the general ‘desire for th[e] historical person behind the cento’, she finally comments that the debate shows that ‘the identification of Proba has been a variable rather than a constant’ (p. 23). The following presentation of ‘Proba the Sibyl and Scholar’ is enhanced with twelve excellently reproduced illustrations of Proba in medieval manuscripts, many of them with a scroll signifying an intellectual. Modern scholarship (since Schenkl's critical text of 1888) has treated her differently; her biography was injected with a number of misleading attributes and ‘personal sentiments’ by such moderns as Ermini, Clark and Hatch, and Pavlovskis, and she has often been conceived as a teacher, after Schenkl. S.C. complains that Proba is made out to be ‘a mother, teacher and wife rather than intellectual and poetic virtuosa’ (p. 52). In passing, I note that it is not the case that ‘none of the church historians who inform us about Julian's decree mention Christian centos’ (p. 53): see Sozomen 5.18.
In Chapter 2, ‘Proba and her Critics’, S.C. makes an important move in questioning the common belief that Jerome had Proba in mind when, in Ep. 53, he spoke slightingly of a ‘babbling old lady’ who may have created a Christian sense from words of Virgil. It seems that most ancient and medieval readers did not pay much attention. An interesting, but untypical, moment in the fourteenth century is the debate between Mussato and Giovannino of Mantua, where the latter invokes Jerome's critique to some effect (pp. 62–3 and p. 93). Some people actually claimed Jerome as a friend and admirer of Proba. Twentieth-century readers are rebuked for seeing Jerome's comment ‘as the moment at which the Church definitively condemned the Cento’ (did it ever?). Though Schenkl could not be sure if Jerome was really referring to Proba in Ep. 53, others were, and began to castigate the cento; the opinion was ‘sanctified and canonized at the turn of the century’ (we are not told how) and ‘a narrative emerged in which Proba … had done a foolish thing’ (p. 66). Until then, ‘any aesthetic shortcomings were rarely considered until some very twentieth-century (!) scholars came along’ (Hagendahl, Fontaine and Pavlovskis are certainly meant; perhaps Stevenson 2005 just escapes). In sum, S.C. concludes, Jerome ‘is made spokesman for the indignation experienced by scholars … and invoked in order to legitimize their own opinion’ (p. 81).
Chapter 3, ‘Proba in the Republic of Women’, begins with Petrarch, who in his tenth Eclogue describes Proba as dedicating a basket of ‘withe-bound’ (sic: Bergin did not write ‘white-bound’) golden apples in the temple. Petrarch's picture is neatly contrasted with that of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who in the previous chapter was pilloried for blaming Proba for the ‘pulling of Homer's gold to pieces by Eudocia, the Greek centonist’ (p. 69); the point being that this shows the ‘pervasive divide in metaphors’ applied by critics in aesthetic matters. There is in this chapter much evidence of a ‘more positive assessment’ of the cento, detectable in Venantius Fortunatus and Queen Radegund, in the early Anglo-Saxon reception, in the ars grammatica of Carolingian times and in the Later Middle Ages, when Proba and Virgil are often found together in manuscripts. In the Renaissance Proba certainly has her promoters, including Vives and the egregious Antoine Dufour, who averred to Anne of France that ‘reading her books [sic], you would say that Vergil and Homer were disciples of Proba’. Proba had a strong impact on early feminist discourse, being evidence of the long tradition of intellectual women; she was represented as erudite, pious and virtuous and a ‘free intellectual’ from a Golden Age when women were treated as such.
Chapter 4, ‘The Confessions of Proba’, deals with the extradiegetic material within the cento, and is built around her ‘confessions’ (confiteor, 8, fateor, 47). In the first passage, S.C. takes issue with the biographical interpretation of the passage describing a poem she had written earlier, supposedly relating the conflict that climaxed in the battle of Mursa (353). For S.C., notwithstanding the roll call of 20 or more persons referenced in the note (they are not, of course, unanimous in detail), there was no such poem; it is a recusatio, ‘where the poet turns against one kind of literary genre in favor of another’, as in well-known passages of Virgil and Ovid. Nor should we take literally the poet's greeting to her companions and husband in the epilogue, a feature to be ‘seen in the light of the emerging Christian Latin tradition, where the authorial persona was often fashioned in a way to create a feeling of authenticity’ (p. 136). (No parallels are offered.)
The next two chapters (‘Centonizing Genesis’; ‘The Gospel of Proba’) explain how Proba uses certain devices to achieve greater patterns of coherence than some critics have detected in the Virgilian passages used. The narrative of Adam and Eve, for example, is rich in prefiguration: the imminent disaster of the Fall is foreshadowed by the tragic story of Dido. A detail may be taken as an indication of the procedure followed here. Words relating to the preparation of meat for the meal by Aeneas and his men (Aen. 1.211) as they reach Africa are used to prefigure Proba's story of God's creation of Eve from the body of Adam (127). Why use the word ‘flay’ both times, for nuda[n]t, correctly rendered ‘laid … bare’ in the appendix? The prefigurative link seems tenuous.
The notion of typology is more to the fore in the presentation of ‘the Gospel of Proba’. A typical example is Hercules, who in some passages prefigures Christ, but that role is also sometimes taken by others, such as Jove, Venus, Minerva, and even Gyas and Polyphemus, but there is rich discussion of this and other matters. Two fascinating metapoetic readings end the book: on pages 187–8 we read ‘the teachings of Proba's Christ assume the form of analogies according to which the Romans must found a Christian kingdom’, and that ‘the rich young man’ of three gospels represents Virgil, ‘who cannot let go his riches and is unable to fully form part of the new religion’. This perhaps sheds light on S.C.'s unanswered question, whether ‘Christian truth was already present in Vergil's works’, or ‘the slightly more conventional position that several isolated passages can be interpreted allegorically’ of Christ.
It is a pity that S.C.'s script was not more carefully copy-edited, in order to remove mistakes such as ‘where’ for ‘were’, ‘aught’ for ‘ought’, and misleading expressions such as ‘the statutes of Saint Paul’ (the school), not to mention plain typos. Errors like these could run into the hundreds.
