Ovid in the Middle Ages

Ovid is perhaps the most important surviving Latin poet and his work has influenced writers throughout the world. This volume presents a groundbreaking series of essays on his reception across the Middle Ages. The collection includes contributions from distinguished Ovidians as well as leading specialists in medieval Latin and vernacular literature, clerical and extra-clerical culture and medieval art, and addresses questions of manuscript and textual transmission, translation, adaptation and imitation. It also explores the intersecting cultural contexts of the schools (monastic and secular), courts and literate lay households. It elaborates the scale and scope of the enthusiasm for Ovid in medieval Europe, following readers of the canon from the Carolingian monasteries to the early schools of the Île de France and on into clerical and curial milieux in Italy, Spain, the British Isles and even the Byzantine Empire.

James G. Clark is Reader in History at the University of Bristol. He has published widely on the learned culture of later medieval England. His publications include A Monastic Renaissance at St Albans: Thomas Walsingham and his Circle c.1350–c.1440 (2004). His research on the reception of the classics has been supported by fellowships from the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Frank T. Coulson is Professor in the Department of Greek and Latin at the Ohio State University where he serves as Director of Palaeography in the Center for Epigraphical and Palaeographical Studies. He has published extensively on the medieval and Renaissance manuscript tradition of Ovid. His books include The Vulgate Commentary on Ovid's Metamorphoses: The Creation Myth and the Story of Orpheus (1991) and (with Bruno Roy) Incipitarium Ovidianum: A Finding Guide for Texts in Latin Related to the Medieval School Tradition on Ovid (2000).

Kathryn L. Mckinley is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She has published several studies on Ovid in medieval England (both in manuscript contexts and vernacular poetry). Her publications include Reading the Ovidian Heroine: ‘Metamorphoses’ Commentaries 1100–1618 (2001). She is currently at work on a study of Chaucer's House of Fame.

James G. Clark, Frank T. Coulson and Kathryn L. McKinley

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City

Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107002050

© Cambridge University Press 2011

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2011

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

ISBN 978-1-107-00205-0 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Illustrations

Notes on contributors

Robert Black is Professor of Renaissance History at the University of Leeds. His most recent books are Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, Teachers, Pupils and Schools, c. 1250–1500 (2007) and Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Tradition and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century (2001).

James G. Clark is Reader in History at the University of Bristol. His research focuses on the books and literary culture of English monasteries in the later Middle Ages. He is the author of A Monastic Renaissance at St Albans: Thomas Walsingham and his Circle, c.1350–1440 (2004) and has published articles in the English Historical Review, Speculum and the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society.

Frank T. Coulson is Professor in the Department of Greek and Latin at the Ohio State University where he serves as Director of Palaeography in its Center for Epigraphical and Palaeographical Studies. He has published extensively on the medieval school tradition on Ovid and is currently completing work for the Ovid volume of the Catalogus translationum et commentariorum.

Vicente Cristóbal is Professor in Latin Philology at Complutense University in Madrid. He has translated and commented on Roman poets including Horace, Ovid, Virgil, and on the Trojan histories of Dares and Dictys. His research is focused on Latin poetry of the Augustan period and especially on the classical tradition in Spanish literature.

Marilynn Desmond is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Binghamton University and the author of Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval “Aeneid” (1994) and Ovid's Art and the Wife of Bath: The Ethics of Erotic Violence (2006). Her research interests focus on Classics and medieval narrative, Chaucer, feminist and queer theory.

Elizabeth Fisher is Professor of Classics at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. She has edited the speeches of Michael Psellos for Teubner and has published numerous articles on Michael Psellos, Maximos Planoudes and Manuel Holobolos.

Warren Ginsberg is Knight Professor of Humanities at the University of Oregon. His books and articles treat classical and medieval literature; he is especially interested in Ovid, Dante, Boccaccio and Chaucer. His current project is Ovid in Rome: Ovid in the Middle Ages.

Ralph J. Hexter is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature, and Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor, University of California, Davis. He is the author of Ovid and Medieval Schooling: Studies in Medieval School Commentaries on Ovid's ‘Ars amatoria’, ‘Epistulae ex Ponto’, and ‘Epistulae Heroidum’ (1986) and numerous articles on the medieval school tradition on Ovid. He is currently completing research on Latin commentaries in print for the Ovid volume of the Catalogus translationum et commentariorum.

Carla Lord is retired as Professor of Art History from the Fine Arts Department of Kean University in Union, NJ. She is the author of ‘Marks of ownership in medieval manuscripts: The case of the Rouen Ovide moralisé’ and ‘Illustrated Manuscripts of Berchorius before the Age of Printing’. She is currently working on a survey of lesser-known illuminated manuscripts of Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Kathryn L. McKinley is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She has published several studies on Ovid in medieval England (both in manuscript contexts and vernacular poetry). Her publications include Reading the Ovidian Heroine: ‘Metamorphoses’ Commentaries 1100–1618 (2001). She is currently at work on a study of Chaucer's House of Fame.

Ana Pairet is Associate Professor of French at Rutgers University, NJ. She is the author of Les mutacions des fables: Figures de la métamorphose dans la littérature française du Moyen Âge (2002).

Siegfried Wenzel is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Macaronic Sermons: Bilingualism and Preaching in Late-Medieval England (1994) and with Stephen G. Nichols, The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany (1996). Most recently, he has published Preaching in the Age of Chaucer: Selected Sermons in Translation (2008).