Metamorphosis: the Changing Face of Ovid in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (review)

The editors of this handsome volume deserve congratulations for several reasons. As a collection arising from a conference it has come out in remarkably good time (experta dico), and has attained a degree of coherence unusual in such cases.

Its unity of focus, despite essays ranging from the Middle Ages to Milton, is owed partly to the excellent introduction provided by the editors, and partly to the fact that nearly all the authors, while acknowledging the important role of intermediaries, take us back to the text of Ovid's Metamorphoses itself, while exploring such broader themes as selfhood, authority, and change (p. 129).

The introduction discusses the reception of Ovid's 'epic' in a variety of contexts from the poet's own time to Ausonius. Keith and Rupp show that on the one hand the poem was popular and widely read in antiquity, spawning imitators and imitations in epic, tragedy and prose fiction; on the other that Ovid's witty and epigrammatic formulations were disapproved of by teachers of oratory. Particularly interesting, in the light of Chapters 3 and 11 (both focussing on the Diana/Actaeon story), is their analysis of Apuleius Met. 2.14, a passage that describes a statue group of Diana and Actaeon. Here Apuleius' use of the Ovidian model also evokes the topos of comparison between literature and the visual arts (see especially Chapter 12).

The range of medieval, Early Modern and Baroque authors discussed in the individual chapters is itself an indication of the pervasiveness and endurance of the Metamorphoses (alive even in modern Australia through such controversial recreations as Barry Kovsky's The Lost Echo – Kovsky's homoerotic interpretation of Diana has a precedent in the Ovide Moralisé (cf. pp. 70-2)). Without being overtly systematic, the collection dwells on a number of important moments in the reception of the Metamorphoses in France, England, Italy and Spain. This makes it a good supplement to the survey articles on Ovid in the Middle Ages and Renaissance in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid (2002).

The collection provides many new insights into the uses of Ovid by writers and artists. In some studies the engagement is with texts, such as commentaries, allegories and translations, that deal with Ovid directly (Chaps. 1 and 2); others pursue more subtle and covert allusions, in reworkings of particular fables or motifs (Christine de Pizan's Mutacion de Fortune and Chemin de long estude (Chaps. 3 and 4); Gower's Confessio amantis 5, Chaucer's Wife of Bath (Chaps. 6 and 7); Petrarch's Secretum and Canzoniere and Maurice Scève's Délie (Chaps. 10 and 11); Michelangelo's Venus and Cupid (Chap. 12); Cervantes' Don Quijote and Góngora's Solitudes (Chaps. 13 and 14); Milton's Paradise Lost (Chap. 15)), or Ovid's 'stranger' faces (cf. p. 151), in new cultural contexts (alchemy, Chap. 8; demonology, Chap. 9).

Maggie Kilgour says (p. 267): 'the Metamorphoses has served as a spur to thinking about metamorphosis itself and its relation to the process of artistic revision. Ovidian stories seem to be irresistible to anyone interested in understanding the phenomenon of change – be it natural, supernatural, religious, cultural, political, or, especially, literary'. Andrew Feldherr says (in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid): 'Thus metamorphosis continually compels readers to refigure their relationship to the text, their understanding of the narratives it contains (p. 165) … The fundamental ambiguity of metamorphosis thus at once reflects, and helps bring about, the transformation of Ovid's text into a dynamic locus for defining and codifying political and social roles' (p. 178). This juxtaposition demonstrates the potential for continuing dialogue between classical scholars' readings of the Metamorphoses (which have undergone a significant change in the last few decades), and those of Early Modern...