cento

noun

1. A hotchpotch, a mixture; especially a piece made up of quotations from other authors, or a poem containing individual lines from other poems.

   “But, Sʳ, I will no longer tire your patience wᵗʰ these monsters (the subject of every contemptuous pamphlet) then with the madness of the Anabaptists, Quakers, Fift Monarchy-men, and a cento of unheard of heresies besides, which, at present, deform the once renowned Church of England, and approach so little to the pretended Reformation, which we in France have been made to believe, that there is nothing more heavenly wide.”

   “Now look out in the Gradus for Purus, and you find as the first synonime, lacteus; for coloratus, and the first synonime is purpureus. I mention this by way of elucidating one of the most ordinary processes in the ferrumination of these centos.”

   “And Captain McCabe says: "I have always regarded the letter as a sort of 'cento' of odds and ends (badly put together) from Lee's genuine letters."”

   “Paradise Lost, as Teskey observes, is a cento, a vast echo chamber of classical texts, all twisted into new shapes.”