SEMINAR -
The Life of an Early Christian Poet

Fellow, SCAS
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Uppsala University

Hybrid event.
Zoom Webinar: https://uu-se.zoom.us/j/65802739142 External link, opens in new window.

ABSTRACT:
Faltonia Betitia Proba (c. 320–c. 370) is the earliest Christian woman poet whose work luckily survives. Her biography, however, can only be pieced together from fragmentary evidence: a handful of inscriptions, scattered later testimonia, and her Cento Vergilianus de laudibus Christi—a late-antique “patchwork poem” built by the strict cento method of recombining Virgilian lines. Drawing on the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid, Proba retells episodes from Genesis, Exodus, and the Gospels, framing them with brief passages of her own composition. The opening chapter of my forthcoming monograph Proba: The First Christian Woman Poet—the first full biography of Proba—reconstructs, so far as the sources permit, the social, political, and intellectual world that shaped her life. I examine her patrician upbringing in the Petronian household, her advanced education in grammar, rhetoric, and Scripture, and her marriage to the senator Clodius Celsinus Adelphius during the civil war (350–353) between Constantius II and Magnentius. I then turn to the Cento, considering how its playful, rule-bound recomposition reflects both the literary culture of late-antique Rome and Proba’s own negotiation between classical authorities and Christian belief. In this lecture I present the key findings of this effort to trace an ancient life from sparse evidence and reflect on its difficulties and value.