David Ungvary

For many early Christian exegetes, the cento was a byword for compositional practices antithetical to legitimate scriptural commentary. This chapter examines one such assessment issued by Jerome to Paulinus of Nola. As Jerome elucidates his poetics of exegesis for a prospective protégé, he warns against those who ‘mangle’ the Bible like centonists. His condemnation raises questions about what ‘centonising’ interpretation entailed, as well as who performed it. Elaborating on scholarship that identifies Ambrose of Milan as the target of his disapproval, the ensuing analysis clarifies the ‘centonising’ procedures that Jerome discouraged
by evaluating a sample of Ambrose’s exegesis (De obitu Valentiniani) in light of the monk’s critique. Relying on diagnostics provided by The Jeweled Style, this reading shows how Ambrose’s exegetical writing incorporated conventions of the cento and other contemporary poetry. Jerome’s opposition to these integrations thus illuminates an evolving debate over the
compatibility of mainstream poetics and scriptural interpretation.

Around AD 653, Eugenius II, bishop of Toledo, composed a first‐person poetic epitaph for the deceased Visigothic king Chindasuinth (r. 642–53) in which the monarch is made to speak with self‐deprecating candour. This paper offers a reassessment of the poem's language and rhetorical strategy by situating it within contemporary discourses surrounding royal admonition and penance. Rather than interpreting Eugenius's composition as an act of defamation, as the majority of critics have done, it reads the poem as a dignifying literary expression of atonement. This reading corresponds with other specimens of Eugenius's poetry and evidence from a developing literary culture at Chindasuinth's court.

This essay examines a literary exchange between the Visigothic poet-king Sisebut (612-621 AD) and his scholar-bishop Isidore of Seville following an anomalous sequence of eclipses. After Sisebut commissioned a scientific treatise from Isidore on such natural phenomena, he responded to the bishop’s prose with a short poem on lunar eclipses (De eclipsi lunae). This study interprets the exchange of texts not as a literary game, but as high-stakes political correspondence. It situates the king’s verses in an ongoing process of cultural construction in Visigothic Spain, led prominently by Isidore himself, but also tied to a rising ascetic movement. It argues that Sisebut was attuned to Isidore’s designs to manage the discourses through which Christian power was proclaimed, and shows how the king attempted to versify in accord with scientific truth so as to fit within Isidore’s ascetic intellectual program.

This paper seeks to explore the relationship between Sidonius Apollinaris’s renunciation of secular poetic writing, frequently voiced in his letters post-consecration, and the articulation of disavowal in Horace’s poetry. It first establishes Sidonius as an avid reader and imitator of Horace, who, as a polymetric versifier and moral philosopher, offered the Christian poet-bishop a classical template around which to mold his own literary practice. The paper then examines parallels in these authors’ autobiographical rhetoric. In middle age, Horace famously retired to the countryside and threatened to give up uersus et cetera ludicra in pursuit of the good life (Epistles I, 1.10-11). Similarly, Sidonius wrote self-reflectively in his final book of letters that he had quit verse writing upon his entry to the clergy because the “frivolity of verses” did not suit the “serious behavior” expected of his ecclesiastical office (Ep. IX, 12.1). What binds these two poets more closely together is the paradoxical way each experimented with the rhetoric of poetic renunciation in verse. For, like Horace, Sidonius sometimes used poetry to express his desire to forsake it. On one occasion, he even did so in “Asclepiads molded on Horace’s anvil” (Ep. IX, 13.2). Gregson Davis has studied renunciation strategy in Horatian lyric, describing the poet’s revision of traditional recusatio as “generic disavowal”, a device by which he disingenuously seeks to assimilate the content and styles he simultaneously claims to preclude. This paper argues that Sidonius was attuned to this rhetorical strategy, and demonstrates his attempts to replicate it in his own poetic writing. It concludes by considering Sidonius’s poetic renunciation as a writerly act or behavior, following the approach of modern historians of late antique religious literature. These critics interpret authorship as a kind of genre “seen from the writer’s point of view as the ritualization of literary patterns…traditions and structures, as authors conform themselves to preexisting models” (Kreuger: 6). If so, Sidonius’s ascetic-poetic voice may be heard attempting to harmonize Horatian discursive strategies with Christian authorial practices. When Jerome famously asked “What has Horace to do with the psalter?” he expected no reply (Ep. 22.9.7). But for Sidonius, this rhetorical question became a lodestone of personal, spiritual inquiry.

This paper employs Isidore of Seville’s De Poetis as an interpretive lens through which to view the poetic activity of seventh-century Spain. As Valerie Flint has argued, though the Etymologies constitute a rather learned compendium, its entries may still be read as socially salient texst; that is, as “the informed and practical observations of a conscientious pastor of souls” (51). Therefore, we may ask what Isidore’s entry on poets, and his use of poetry throughout the Etymologies, reveals about the nature and function of the poet’s role in Visigothic society.
Situated among articles on heretics, sibyls, and magicians, the very location of De Poetis within the Etymologies (VIII.vii) suggests that poetry occupied a strange and perhaps dangerous place in the intellectual world of Visigothic Spain. This is borne out by Isidore’s description of the poet’s function: “to transform things that have actually taken place into other forms, modified with some grace by means of indirect representations” (Barney et al. 181). The notion of the poet’s transformative artifice pervades the Etymologies. Isidore makes frequent reference to “poetic fictions,” which his scholarship tries to “undo” either through refutation or clarification so that they may be reliably used as evidence for his claims.
Pairing this analysis with investigation into some of the poetry of Isidore’s contemporaries (e.g. Eugenius of Toledo, King Sisebut), I will argue that Visigothic poets were highly alert to the anxiety over poetic artifice. Through rhetorical strategies that highlight self-correction and the rejection of falsehood, these poets confronted this anxiety and worked to establish the poetic mode as intellectually authoritative.

The purpose of this paper is to reexamine Ennodius of Pavia’s (473-521) disavowal of poetry in his autobiographical prose work, the Eucharisticon (written c. 511), as an act of ascetic renunciation in line with a Christian Latin poetic tradition. In this confessional text, Ennodius describes how physical illness catalyzed his spiritual transformation from arrogant pursuant of adulation through rhetorical and poetic composition to faithful and fully integrated deacon of the Catholic Church. The obvious parallels to the structure of Augustine’s ‘conversion’ moment, especially the turn from venditor verborum to consumer of scripture (cf. Confessions IX.5.13), have led some readers to criticize the Eucharisticon as derivative. Courcelle tracked Augustine’s influence on Ennodius’s text and determined it to be “a rather mediocre pastiche of the Confessions.” Fontaine, another Quellenforscher, went so far as to question the Christian character of the text. He suggested Horace as a potential model for Ennodius as poet-convert (citing Epist. I.1.10 in which Horace swears off “versus et cetera ludicra”). The prevailing critical chronology of Ennodius’s writings (Sundwall) has also negatively affected interpretations of the Eucharisticon. For it appears that Ennodius continued to write classicizing rhetorical and poetic works even after his apparent renunciation of such literature in the Eucharisticon (sections 4-7, 17). Accordingly, scholars like Kennell (1992) have labeled Ennodius’s autobiography a “fit of personal scrupulousness” after which “his basic rhetoricality prevailed”—a rhetoricality Auerbach once called “mannered to the point of absurdity.” For all this we are left with an image of Ennodius as an artificial, imitative self-fashioner and inconsistent thinker. In this paper I attempt a reconsideration of Ennodius’s autobiographical technique through a twofold inquiry. First, I argue that the Eucharisticon’s literary-imitative character is in fundamental alignment with other spiritual autobiographies of Late Antiquity. If we consider Augustine’s famous conversion scene, for instance, we find his introspective moment in the garden to have been instigated by an introduction to ascetic literature—the Life of St. Antony (Confessions, 8.6.14). As Harpham has argued, this kind of reader-response is a pervasive feature of late ancient confessional texts and central to ascetic discipline in general, which he calls “a science of imitation made possible by the mimetic imitations of texts.” This framework allows for a reappraisal of the Eucharisticon. It is possible to see its imitative and rhetorical qualities as stemming from self-conscious and purposeful engagement with an ascetic literary tradition. Accepting the influence of literary asceticism on the Eucharisticon enables a re-reading of Ennodius’s renunciation of secular literature. In the second part of the paper, I argue that the presentation of his literary turn away from “the fields of poetic composition” echoes rhetoric not found in Augustine’s Confessions, but which belongs more properly to the Christian Latin poetic tradition. In particular, the concomitant disavowal of fiction, lies, and falsehood in the Eucharisticon (section 7) demonstrates a keen awareness of an ascetic poetics promulgated by Christian versifiers like Paulinus of Nola (cf. Carm. 20) and Sedulius (cf. Carmen Paschale, praef.).
In conclusion, the Eucharisticon appears not to deserve the censure it has received as a meager imitation of Augustine’s Confessions. Such criticism misunderstands the fundamentally imitative nature of Late Antique spiritual autobiography, and does not take into consideration the multidimensional nature of Ennodius’s imitative endeavor. Influenced by the ascetic “science of imitation,” Ennodius’s confessional text comprises an intentional and innovative repackaging of ascetic rhetoric culled from various strands of the Christian Latin literary tradition.