DE BONO PUDICITIAE. — A letter transmitted among the works of St. Cyprian, in which a bishop, in strongly rhetorical language, points out to his faithful the reasons for chastity, praises it, indicates its three degrees in virginity, continence, and honorable marriage, demonstrates the wickedness of adultery, proposes the examples of Joseph and Susanna, condemns luxury and feminine adornments, and exhorts them to struggle and pray in order to remain chaste.
There are clear imitations of Tertullian’s De pudicitia and St. Cyprian’s De habitu virginum. That it is not by the latter is apparent from the fact that it does not appear in the list of his works given by Pontius, nor in the catalogue of them discovered by Mommsen, as well as from the difference in style, the scarcity of biblical quotations, so frequent in St. Cyprian, and the absence of any allusion to his troubled circumstances, whereas the authentic writings of the bishop of Carthage all bear a vivid imprint of current events. Weyman, followed by most scholars, on the basis of the similarities of situation and form and of the manner of citing the Bible, considers Novatian the author of this booklet and of its companion, De spectaculis; Monceaux, together with Moricca, regards the two booklets as forgeries produced by a rhetorician, probably a cleric from Cyprian’s school.