CAENA CYPRIANI. - A short work intended to enliven banquets, attributed, according to Brewer, to Cyprian, a poet of Gaul. In it, during a banquet at Cana, attended by the characters of Sacred Scripture, the president of the feast, Iole, orders an inquiry, since some furniture has been stolen by one of the guests.

The idea of representing biblical figures as banqueters is found in Zeno of Verona (l. II, tract. 38), but it is not possible to determine whether he depends on the C. C. or vice versa. The citations of the apocryphal Acts of St. Paul give no clue for fixing the date of the work. This work, read in France on the occasion of the coronation of Charles the Bald (875) and in Rome in the redaction of Rabanus Maurus, was later reduced to verse by John the Deacon and had great diffusion in the Middle Ages.

Bibliography6 works

BIBL.: Editions: PL 4925; K. Streker, MGH, Poet. lat. med. aevi, IV, II, p. 872, under the text of John the Deacon; A. Harnack, Drei wenig beachtete Cyprianische Schriften (Texte und Untersuchungen, 19, 3 b), Leipzig 1899; H. Brewer, Über den Heptateuchdichter Cyprian und die C. C., in Zeitschrift für kathol. Theologie, 28 (1904), p. 98; A. Lapêtre, La «C. C.» et ses énigmes, in Recherches de science relié, 3 (1912), p. 497. For the literary genre, v.: P. Lehmann, Die Parodie im Mittelalter, Munich 1922, p. 25 ff.; E. R. Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, Bern 1948, p. 473.

Erik Peterson

@incollection{ec3_caena_cypriani, author = {Peterson, Erik}, title = {Caena Cypriani}, booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica}, volume = {III}, pages = {275}, note = {Cited by column}, publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico}, address = {Città del Vaticano}, year = {1949}, url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/caena-cypriani} }

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