Medieval Europe was shaped not in separation from antiquity – as the polemics of the Renaissance alleged – but in the light of its enduring presence. The cultural, social, economic and political fabric of Christendom was woven with the patterns of the classical world. The people of the West acknowledged, or aspired to, the status of the Latins, they submitted to the authority of competing forms – princely and pontifical – of an ancient imperium and they set their confessional, cultural and political boundaries on the same eastern frontier as their Roman forebears. Perhaps above all they appropriated the discourse of the ancients and the textual culture(s), learned, literary, public and personal, that had sustained it for so long. In many regions of Europe, the traces of the ancients were tangible, and city, market, port, road and watercourse all bore the imprint of their ancient infrastructure. Yet it was their textual heritage that left the greater mark upon the medieval imagination. A rich variety of authors and texts, authentic, spurious and often fragmentary, revealed antiquity to Europeans between the sixth and the sixteenth centuries. These authorities were welcomed in the schoolroom, the carrel of the cloisterer, the pulpit and, in time, the solar of the recreational reader. A hierarchy emerged, a handful of ancient auctoritates accorded the honours generally reserved for the great masters of Christian doctrine and scriptural exegesis. It was not the sober sages of republic and empire – Virgil, Seneca, Cicero – who proved for medieval audiences the most popular and resonant voices of the pre-Christian past. Arguably, it was another and altogether unorthodox Augustan, Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso, 43 bce – 17 ce), who provided the greatest number and diversity of Europeans with their most memorable encounter with the classical world.1 Like the very best of guides, Ovid's witness was candid, irreverent and truly independent, not only of the Caesarean regime but also of the political, social and spiritual mores over which it presided. It was also wide in scope. Ovid unfolded a tapestry of high politics, history, myth, social comedy and travelogue, which never failed to reward the returning reader and stimulated a clamour of commentary. Before the recovery of Plutarch, Ovid's reports of lives and letters of the early empire provided a unique point of contact with legends greater than his own. The medieval reader was tantalised by personal anecdotes of those whose names were legendary: ‘Virgil I only saw’ (Tristia 4.10.51). The Middle Ages loved the encyclopaedia as no other genre and in Ovid – particularly in the manuscript compendia that collected his works – were combined the key coordinates of Augustan Rome, its arena, the ‘scattered sand of the gladiators’ ring’ (Ars amatoria 1.5), monuments, temples and ‘tier’ theatres, elegantly rendered in hexameters. Whether schoolboy, learned poetaster, preacher or layperson, when medieval readers conjured the classical past for themselves invariably they did so in the words and images of Ovid. In time, they knew him not only as an authority on a past they had lost but also as a counsellor on their present condition, the exigencies of the human experience and its place in the inexorable programme of the divine.
It was ironic that Ovid's voice should reverberate in the Middle Ages when he was silenced by his own. He was banished in 8 ce for an offence perhaps unintended and passed his remaining nine years at Tomis (now Constanţa, on the Black Sea coast, Romania), a satellite urbs un-settled with ‘fierce, wild and woolly’ Getae (Tristia 5.7.11–20) that was the antithesis of Rome.2 His shame was sealed by the public suppression of his works, an act that at least interrupted their transmission and prevented further amendment of his monumental Metamorphoses, since ‘pluribus exemplis scripta fuisse reor’ (Tristia 1.7.24); ultimately the Medea was forgotten and the Medicamina faciei femineae retained only as a fragment.3 Ovid channelled his creativity into vivid, and often introspective, verses on the lives and loves he had lost, Tristia, Epistulae ex Ponto, but they failed to efface the trace of scandal among the literati, who, it would appear, had already begun to deepen the blemishes to his reputation and the reception of his poems. Seneca the Elder (54 bce – 37 ce) scolded him as one who ‘did not know when to leave well alone’ (Controversiae 9.5.17).
There can be no doubt that a certain notoriety, a danger even, surrounded the name of Ovid in the decades following his death. With the conceit characteristic of a following generation, the stylists of the post-Augustan age tempered their evident admiration with a tone of mild reproach. Quintilian (c. 35–95 ce) presented him to his pupils as ‘frivolous’ (‘lascivus’), a poet to be praised ‘in parts’ (‘laudandus tamen partibus’: Institutio oratoria, 10.1.88). Ovid had foreseen such a reception. His envoi to the Tristia expressed fear for its unprotected entry into the city. It may be a measure of its insecurity that there surfaced several codas to the canon – Amores 3.5; Heroides 15, Sappho's epistle; the Consolatio ad Liviam; Halieutica; Nux – whose authenticity was suspect.4 A degree of uncertainty continues to surround the Heroides. On the margins of modern criticism is an ascription to Ovid's contemporary, Julius Montanus; perhaps a more plausible speculation is that the so-called ‘double’ epistles (Heroides 16–21) were composed by a subsequent editor.5 The currency of Ovidian phrases in oral culture in the century after his death, in the epigraphy of the province of Moesia Inferior (the region of Tomis) and Pompei, and in the plays performed in Roman theatres, perhaps also reflects the volatility of his literary profile.6 Indeed he was ‘borne on the lips of the people’: (‘ore legar populi’, Metamorphoses 15.878).
It was once believed that Ovid's reputation was steadily eclipsed by the shade of another Augustan, Virgil. Recent reappraisals of the literature of the Claudian and Neronian eras (41–68 ce), however, have revealed the continuing power of the Ovidian corpus. Persius’ (34–62 ce) swipe at the ‘froth’ of his fellow poets (Satires 1.92–104) perhaps attests to a pervasive preference for the stylistic display that Ovid pioneered.7 His creative mastery of metrical form inspired imitative invention: the dactyls of Statius’ (c. 45–96 ce) Achilleid can be interpreted as a debt to Ovid.8 It was not only his virtuosity that captivated these poets of the so-called Silver Age. His characterisation of classical figures offered a template for new compositions: Statius’ Oedipus was drawn from an Ovidian outline.9 To these inhabitants of a turbulent urbs Ovid also transmitted apparent reportage from the birth pangs of the empire.10 On a different temporal plane he also provided a conspectus of the mythological inheritance of contemporary Rome.11
Such revisionism cannot recast Ovid as the sole stimulus for the poetry of Imperial Rome. Virgil's star never dimmed and Ovid's place was in the ranks – although perhaps the front rank – alongside him.12 Beyond the literary elite, the signs of his reception are scanty. His exact status in the schools of the empire remains unclear, as does his popularity among the ‘reading public’ of the wider empire. Certainly there is little in the evidence of papyri to indicate an unusual intensity in transmission at least to the outer reaches of the empire.13
By the beginning of the fourth century, Ovid was prominent in the schoolroom, one of the prescribed syllabus authors and a quarry, among many others, for grammarians and their students. Those schooled beyond the Latin hegemony – Claudian, Eutropius, Priscian – even carried an echo of their early Ovidian reading. It was a reflection perhaps of the residual unease over his style and subjects that none of his works apparently was subject to the systematic commentary now prepared for the principal syllabus auctores. The residue of a scholial tradition may be apparent in early manuscript glosses; it has been suggested that trace elements are also embedded in the argumenta, a critical companion to the mythography of the Metamorphoses commonly attributed to Lactantius Placidus.14 The origin of the text remains obscure although it is often dated to the fifth or sixth centuries; it has been suggested it was composed for a comparable purpose to the diegeseis, the prose summaries compiled to support readers of the Greek Aetia of Callimachus.15 Grammarians sought to establish the scope of the Virgilian canon but did not extend the enterprise to his exiled younger contemporary; nor did they offer him his own biography.16 Christianity caused the cursus of syllabus auctores to be recast and Ovid, as other pagan authors, again was edged to the margins. The early Christian authorities recognised his value as a pagan point of reference: the Fasti and Metamorphoses appear as minor authorities in the second-century Institutiones divinae of Lactantius Firmianus (c. 250 – c. 325). His discomfort at the challenge which Ovidian chaos posed to the divine programme of creation was explicit: ‘nec audiendi sunt poetae qui aiunt chaos in principio fuisse’ (Institutiones 2.8.8).17 As a new cadre of Christian poet was preferred for their paradigms in the schoolroom, only doctrinal and moral discourse now attested to a continued awareness of Ovid.18 A recent study has shown how, successively, the Augustan's creation myth was corrected with the authority of Genesis by Dracontius, (Claudius Marius) Victorius, and Orientius.19 The fourth-century epigrams of Ausonius cited Metamorphoses and are said to have appropriated an Ovidian vocabulary.20 Perhaps the best witness to his influence at, or after, the fall of imperial Rome (476 ce) was Manlius Anicius Severinus Boethius (c. 480 – c. 525 ce), whose Consolatio philosophiae appears to incorporate reminiscences of both the Amores and the Metamorphoses. Boethius’ absorption of these texts prefigured approaches later in the Middle Ages: clearly he was impressed not only by their stylistic facility but also by their figurative capacity.21 An impression of the persistence of the tradition amid the wreckage of (Christian) Roman culture is provided by Venantius Fortunatus (c. 530–600 × 609) the Italian clerk whose literary career flourished in the ultramontane Merovingian kingdom where the cultural, and perhaps codicological, discontinuities were not so marked. He was also attracted to the figurative models of the Ovidian canon, and in particular the Heroides.22
In the East the eclipse of Ovid appears to have been total: as Elizabeth Fisher observes here, the claim that his works were known to the third-century Quintus of Smyrna remains inconclusive; Eusebius (c. 263 – c. 339) omitted him from his Historia as did the Hellenist annals of John Malaas, George Synkellos and the Egyptian Nonnos of Panopolis.23
The recovery of Latin culture in the north and, at last, in middle Italy, from the turn of the sixth century, did not significantly alter Ovid's status as an author. The earliest, for the most part monastic, evocations of the classical schoolroom followed a syllabus which would have been recognisable to Boethius. The Christian poets remained the corner-stone; a repertory of pagan authors re-surfaced among which Virgil undoubtedly took precedence. Ovid was occasionally glimpsed in writing generated in this context but rarely if ever did he pass into the foreground. The pseudo-Lactantian argumenta on the Metamorphoses may have originated in this period, although the text incorporates earlier scholia and is too slight, and at times detached from the subject-text, to signify a shift in Ovid's schoolroom status.24 Perhaps in Byzantium he was better known in this period: Fisher finds that for John the Lydian (490–c. 565) Ovid was a name to be dropped before a Greek readership now conscious of Latin auctores; his appearance a century later in the universal chronicle of John of Antioch underlines the East's early advance on this most popular of western poets.25
Ovid's continuing obscurity at the foundation of the medieval Latin tradition has been seen as a matter of taste: Ludwig Traube saw Ovid's star wax only after those of Virgil and Horace had begun to wane.26 Perhaps it should be connected with the descent of his works in manuscript. There are indications of an hiatus in circulation between the sixth and the eighth centuries. After a single witness to Ovid's ancient readership, a solitary fragment, 25 lines of the Epistulae ex Ponto, which dates from the second quarter of the fifth century and probably originated in Italy, there is no copy extant which can be dated earlier than the ninth century.27 This is not enough to demonstrate a discontinuity, but recent research would suggest knowledge of Ovid had drifted to the fringes of Europe carried by the same currents, perhaps, as the cenobitic tradition. The earliest surviving manuscript of the Metamorphoses (London, BL, Add. MS 11967, s. xex.), was written in an Irish script and incorporates erroneous readings that are redolent of the insular tradition.28 There is also a suggestion that the archetype of medieval copies of the amatory verse entered mainstream circulation at the close of the eighth century from Iberia or even North Africa.29 Thus Ovid the Roman citizen returned to Europe from the old imperial frontier.
Whatever route was followed, Ovid had recovered his early profile in Europe by (and probably before the beginning of) the ninth century. Traube located his ‘aetas Ovidiana’ after 1100 ce but now there can be no doubt the first stirrings of a new audience for Ovid were seen two centuries before.30 The early codices of the amatory poetry, which date between the ninth and the eleventh centuries, appear to be descended from a common exemplar, a codex which may have been compiled c. 800 and contained each of the amatory poems as well as the Heroides.31 The earliest medieval copies of other works are dated to this same period. Monasteries that were the powerhouse of the Benedictine mission in southern and central Europe were pre-eminent in their reception, production and transmission.32 Early witnesses to the Amores, the Ars amatoria and the Metamorphoses emerged from the scriptorium of Sankt Gallen before the end of the eleventh century.33 A south German manuscript of the same period, Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm 4610, contains the earliest commentary on Metamorphoses: the text has been connected with the master Manegold of Lautenbach (d. after 1103): at the very least it bears witness to the new-found prominence of the Ovidian canon in claustral (and cathedral) schoolrooms.34 During the reign of the arch reformer Abbot Desiderius (1058–87) Montecassino made and received early exemplars of Fasti and Metamorphoses: the latter, known as the ‘Naples Ovid’ (Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale, MS iv. f 3) contains the earliest surviving scheme of images connected with the text, which Carla Lord examines here.35 It is worth noting the Ibis also appears to have entered mainstream circulation from Italy 36 The prominence of these continental centres perhaps explains the paucity of classical exemplars to the north and west: the handful of early Anglo-Saxon inventories does not feature a profusion of auctores; of Ovid there is no trace.37 The century after 1050 witnessed a wider circulation and it would not be a great exaggeration to claim the Ovidian canon as ‘the common ornament of libraries’ (implied in Tristia 1.7.1–4):38 recent studies of manuscripts and their contemporary witnesses – catalogues, and the identification of better-documented stemma descendants – have brought this into sharper focus. The earliest catalogue of England's premier monastery, the cathedral priory of Christ Church, Canterbury, a twelfth-century document, records copies of each of the principal works combined with other syllabus texts in composite volumes, together with four discrete codices of the ‘Ovidius magnus’, the common identification for the Metamorphoses.39 The integration of Ovid among other auctores in the poetic anthologies of this period is perhaps an index of how widely his works were now reproduced; and as an invaluable repertorium has now revealed, the familiarity of Ovid might also be measured in the parallel manuscript transmission of epitomes, extracts and imitative Ovidiana.40 In the same century, as Vicente Cristóbal recounts here, copies of Ovid passed over the Pyrenees into the learned convents (and courts) of Latin Spain.41 His passage eastward remains opaque, although a popular reception might be conjectured from the appearance of a distich in a Hungarian (Magyar) charter.42 The only exception to the unrestricted transmission was perhaps the Heroides, which, in spite of a ninth- and tenth-century readership, subsequently appears to have receded from general view until its rediscovery after 1300.43
The source of the surge in Ovidian enthusiasm was the schools that flourished not only at major monastic centres but now also affiliated to secular cathedrals and even imperial or royal courts: the significance of these extra-clerical environs has been revealed through recent codicological analysis. Here the amatory poems, in particular, the Heroides, Metamorphoses and the poetry of exile, reassumed their early role as ‘readers’ for students of the artes, recognised again for their rich repository of grammatical, metrical and rhetorical lore. A remarkable manuscript survival, the so-called ‘class book’ of Saint Dunstan (Oxford, Bodl., Auct. MS f 4 32, s. xmed.), gives an early glimpse of Ovid in this context: the book contains a copy of the Heroides furnished with interlinear glosses both in Latin and the Old English of the marches.44 The glosses emphasise that the first purpose of Ovid, and other auctores in the schoolroom, was to secure and test the linguistic skill of the novice Latinist.45 Robert Black here describes a comparable manuscript (of Ovid's Tristia) a century later in date (Florence, BML, San Marco MS 223, fols. 59r–66v) replete with interlinear glosses.46 The centrality of Ovid on these curricula is reflected in the sheer intensity of glossed copies that Black records from Tuscan (and other regional) centres. The case of Gunzo of Novara, which Black recalls, confirms that even a gauche courtier could claim familiarity with Ovid.47
Here Ovid was regarded not only as a point of reference for those beginning to grasp Latin grammar, syntax and vocabulary, but also a model of fine poetic style. The old exile had expected nothing less: ‘your very style will bring you recognition’ (Tristia i.1.47–72). Manuscript copies from this period carry marginal and interlinear glosses – compiled by masters of the clerical or novice schola – that elaborate the metrical and rhetorical structures of the text.48 Clearly the adept student was expected not only to digest the use of these devices but to (attempt to) recreate them in their own compositions. The stylish verse of Théodulf of Orléans (c. 760–821) suggests the imitation of Ovid was a feature of scholastic culture already at the beginning of the ninth century.49 The composition of the pseudo-Ovidian De pediculo, apparently of monastic origin, confirms that these exercises were encouraged in claustral scholae. By the twelfth century, the impulse to emulate the syllabus auctores was intense and it was said Master Bernard of Chartres (d. after 1124) expected of his pupils nothing less than to assume the mantle of the poetae.50 The accomplished pseudo-epic Alexandreis of Master Walter of Châtillon (fl. 1170) represents the fulfilment of this trend in the third quarter of the twelfth century.51 The Spanish Libro de Alexandre shows that even before 1200 the impulse to imitate Ovid was not confined to the Latin schools of the north.52 The Ovidian persona was willingly appropriated by his clerical imposters: Théodulf's partner in verse, Modoin of Autun (d. 840 × 843), was known to his schoolroom and courtier contemporaries as ‘Naso’.53
As an exemplar of Latin style, Ovid was also adopted by the twelfth-century pioneers of the ars dictaminis. The Italian Bene da Firenze placed Ovid among the ‘philosophos et auctores’ of his art; the new masters of medieval grammar and rhetoric – Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Alexander of Villa Dei, Pietro da Isolella – implicitly reinforced Ovid's rising status in this field through their frequent reminiscence of Ovidian phraseology.54 The particular appeal of Ovidian rhetoric and rhythm remained powerful in the later Middle Ages, long after the climate of the schoolroom had changed. The literary turn taken by masters and students of dictamen after 1350 led paradigms from the exile poetry, Heroides and Metamorphoses to be gathered in preceptive manuals. A new genre of manual on metre, generated by grammar masters in the first and second quarters of the fifteenth century, also privileged Ovidian paradigms.55 Further analysis of these neglected pre-humanist textbooks, which in their reception bridged the divide between the elite littérateur and the work-a-day chancery clerk, is long overdue.
Even at the higher reaches of the curriculum, among the arts of the quadrivium, master and student recognised Ovid as their guide. His cosmos was a common source for studies that so often elided the distinction between astronomy and astrology; the figures that frequently illustrated astrological compendia in the later Middle Ages were rich with Ovidian reference.56 The fascination for alchemy that flourished on the fringes of syllabus science also found a stimulus in Ovid: Hermaphroditus (Metamorphoses 4) served as a metaphor for the transformation of any matter.57
Of course, the status of Ovid in the schoolrooms of the early, and high, Middle Ages should not be overstated. The pedagogic properties of his works were widely appreciated, but their materia (as contemporary masters would term it), amor, dolor and fabulae deorum, presented problems for boys, clerks, novices and their custodians. The unease of monastic masters intensified in the age of reform inaugurated by the Benedictine Pope Gregory VII. Conrad of Hirsau (c. 1070 – c. 1150) questioned the merit of mining nuggets of gold from the filth of Ovid since the student became so mired in the dirt.58 The Norman monk, Guibert of Nogent (c. 1055–1124) perhaps reflected the prevailing monastic view of the twelfth century when he expressed his feelings of guilt for returning to Ovid.59 Nor was it solely monastic sensibility that was unsettled. The most provocative of peripatetic masters, Pierre Abélard, proved chary of the classical auctores.60 In his Speculum duorum, Gerald of Wales (c. 1146 – c. 1223) dismissed the secular (and pagan) literature of the schoolroom as among the trifles of youth from which the dedicated clerk must detach himself in his maturity, for higher studies.61 Of course, as contemporary critics of sexual discourse have demonstrated, such discomfort was studiedly disingenuous: pedagogic glosses were not troubled by prudery.62
Yet from the time his verses returned to the schoolroom Ovid was also regarded as a reliable authority on themes that ran to the very heart of the higher studies of secular clerk and regular religious. From its first circulation, the narratives of the pagan deities recounted in the Metamorphoses were regarded as a complement to Christian studies in mythography. When the author known to medieval readers as Theodolus composed, perhaps in the tenth century, his account of the conflict between Christian truth and pagan mendacity, called the Ecloga, he turned to the Metamorphoses as well as the orthodox authorities, Lactantius and Fulgentius: ‘the very power of the celestials stirs our hearts’(Ex Ponto 1.1.21–46). In the confessional flux of the Gregorian period, the mythographical impulse was reignited and the secular clerks and Cluniac monks of England and Normandy returned to Ovid, alongside his early Christian analogues, Lactantius, Fulgentius and Isidore, to parse, and to neutralise, pagan myth. The compendium attributed to Alberic of London (once known as ‘Vatican Mythographer III’) originated in this climate and context; the earliest known genealogia deorum gentilium, preserved in Oxford, Bodl., Digby MS 221, perhaps should also be assigned to this period and place.63 The induction of Ovid into the nascent faculties of theology was signalled perhaps by the pioneering commentary of Thomas of Perseigne (d.1190) which turned to the Sulmonian exile to expound the Song of Songs.64