Centones

The Epithalamium Fridi is a sixth-century Virgilian cento that commemorates the marriage of the Vandal noble Fridus with his unnamed bride. Its author, the African poet Luxurius, engages in versatile poetic play fusing Virgil with multiple epithalamial models such as Statius, Claudian, and Ausonius. Through the dynamics of triangular intertextu-ality the centonist is able to strengthen the wedding poem's generic bonds and to connect himself and his work firmly to the classical Roman tradition. At the same time, echoes of distinctive African idiosyncrasies as prefigured by Dracontius highlight the hybrid character of sixth-century Romano-Vandal elite culture and its celebration of what appears to be a distinctive African Romanness.

La poesía de sor Juana Inés de la Cruz inaugura, al retomar el diálogo con la obra de Ausonio, una distinción fundante entre “obra” y “trabajo”. Convertida en problema poético (y de poética), esta distinción es reflexionada y desplegada a lo largo de su obra y establece, con sus circunstancias coloniales de enunciación, las condiciones de emergencia de una nueva noción de poema. Y con ella, de una nueva figura de poeta. Y con ambas, una nueva“naturaleza” para la poesía.

This paper proposes a new interpretation for the first lines of the wellknown Ausonius’ Imminutio scene (Cent. nupt. 101-105), based on two main aspects: the relationship between this passage and other sections of this work, and the links with the corpus Vergilianum, source for the cento. Thus, this new exegesis is not intended to be definitive but rather an interpretive alternative to the pervasive figure of the ambiguity that permeates the whole cento.

This paper opens with an assessment of A. Rondholz’s proposal to attribute line 171 of Hosidius Geta’s cento to Medea. His proposal seems hardly convincing, and the text itself of
this line raises some doubts. A new interpretation is put forward, based on a punctuation different from the customary one.