CAENA CYPRIANI

CAENA CYPRIANI. - A short work intended to enliven banquets, attributed, according to Brewer, to Cipriano, a poet from Gaul. It imagines that, during a banquet at Cana attended by the personages of Holy Scripture, the president of the feast, Iole, orders an investigation, since some furniture has been stolen by one of the guests.

The idea of representing biblical figures as banqueters is found in Zenone di Verona (l. II, tract. 38), but it is not possible to determine whether he depends on the C. C. or vice versa. The quotations from the apocryphal Acts of St. Paul provide no clue for establishing the date of the work. Read in France on the occasion of the coronation of Carlo il Calvo (875), and in Rome in the recension of Rabano Mauro, it was subsequently rendered into verse by Giovanni Diacono and enjoyed wide circulation in the Middle Ages.

BIBL.: Editions: PL 4925; K. Streker, MGH, Poet. lat. med. aevi, IV, II, p. 872, sotto il testo di Giovanni Diacono; A. Harnack, Drei wenig beachtete Cyprianische Schriften (Texte und Untersuchungen, 19, 3 b), Lipsia 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. On the literary genre, v.: P. Lehmann, Die Parodie im Mittelalter, Monaco 1922, p. 25 sg.; E. R. Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, Berna 1948, p. 473.

Erik Peterson

Cite this article

“CAENA CYPRIANI.” Enciclopedia Cattolica, vol. III (1949), p. 184. Azione Romana digital edition, https://azioneromana.com/article/caena-cypriani.