A translation of an influential French translation
THE MEDIEVAL FRENCH OVIDE MORALISÉ An English translation
K. SARAH-JANE MURRAY AND MATTHIEU BOYD 1,200pp; 3 vols. D. S. Brewer. £295 (US $410).
FEW CLASSICAL WRITERS have had as profound and enduring an impact on western culture as Ovid, whose Metamorphoses remains foundational to our understanding of classical mythology. In the Middle Ages too the work elicited a great deal of attention: it is among the most frequently cited and reused works of classical literature across the period. One of the best glimpses into this medieval reception is to be found in the Ovide moralisé. A vast poem of some 72,000 lines composed in France c.1320, it retells the Metamorphoses for an aristocratic Christian audience. For each section of a tale the medieval author provides a translation of Ovid’s original (or occasionally of some other relevant text) into Old French, followed by an explanation of its moral message.
Nowhere are the tales dismissed as the misguided ramblings of a pagan. Christian interpretations of pre-Christian writings were common in the medieval world, and the Ovide is no exception: in the eyes of the French poet the Metamorphoses were just as much part of God’s plan as more overtly Christian texts. As a consequence the religious message drawn out by the Ovide’s glosses and commentaries would not have been seen as an innovative imposition on the work. It would have been considered an integral part of it, one there from the beginning, waiting to be uncovered by later generations.
The Ovide’s version of the tale of Tiresias, found in the third of its fifteen books, illustrates how Ovid was reworked. The Theban prophet Tiresias, so the myth goes, was the only person to have experienced life and love from both a male and a female perspective, having been transformed into a woman for seven years after striking two magical serpents with his staff. As such he was called to adjudicate on a debate between Jupiter and Juno about which of the sexes experienced greater carnal pleasure. On his response that it was women, Juno, in a characteristic fit of pique, punished Tiresias by depriving him of his sight. Jupiter, distraught at this outcome, gave him the compensatory gift of prophecy.
In recent scholarship the story of Tiresias has been read as an example of an ancient author engaging with ideas about the socially constructed nature of gender. Many of Ovid’s early readers, by contrast, would have taken it at face value as a story about divine power and humorous evidence in support of assumptions about female sexual voracity. The author of the Ovide takes a third view. First he reads Tiresias’ tale as a caution against the dangers of the mulier perniciosa, the wicked woman who appears in so much medieval literature as a counterpoint to the virtuous damsel. Then, from a more religious per
