n.
or epithalamion
Nuptial song or poem in honour or praise of a bride and bridegroom.
In ancient Greece such songs were a traditional way of invoking good fortune on a marriage and often of indulging in ribaldry. The earliest evidence for literary epithalamiums are fragments by Sappho ; the oldest surviving Latin examples are three by Catullus . In the Renaissance, epithalamiums based on classical models were written in Italy, France, and England; that of Edmund Spenser (1595) is considered the finest in English.