The Middle English Text of Caxton’s Ovid, Book 1: Edited from Cambridge, Magdalene College, Old Library, MS F.4.34 with a Parallel Text of The Ovide moralisé en prose II Edited from Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS fonds français 137 ed. by Diana Rumrich (review)

William Caxton’s Middle English translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, completed in 1480, has had a checkered interpretive history. The translation survives in a single manuscript undertaken as two volumes, with no printed copies extant and no documentable early circulation or influence to speak of. Its relatively ambitious iconographic program was, for whatever reason, abandoned; only four out of fifteen projected illuminations were executed. Caxton’s translation was the first into English of Ovid’s great epic, antedating Arthur Golding’s rendition by eighty-five years, but its significance has been regarded—even in the field of Caxton studies—as slight, in part because it is not a direct translation of Ovid’s Latin (although it claims to be) but a frequently awkward transliteration of a moralized French intermediary, which itself stood at several removes from the ancient original. The two volumes of Caxton’s translation apparently were separated from an early point, and their staggered availability to modern scholars—the volume containing books 1–9 surfaced in a lot in the Phillipps collection only in 1964—has inhibited serious critical apprehension of the text. Where Caxton’s translation has been studied, its originality has been (rather wistfully) overstated because of confusion surrounding the polarities of influence among the late-medieval moralized Ovid MSS and Colard Mansion’s (printed) Bible des poetes, which together constitute its textual family. The truth regarding Caxton’s translation, a more mundane one, has made Caxton’s text still less amenable to interpretive engagement: his translation is an extremely literal rendition of the second recension of the prose Ovide moralisé (OM Pr.II), which itself has not seen light, excepting one brief excerpt, in any modern edition. Unlike so many of Caxton’s other literary projects, his Ovidian translation held no special significance for English letters of his day or for the intellectual history of Ovidianism.

Rumrich’s critical edition of Book 1 and (title notwithstanding) the first part of Book 2 of Caxton’s Ovid, presented in parallel-text format with OM Pr.II, initiates a large-scale project to redeem this late Middle English work of cultural appropriation for serious study in its own right. This edition, published in the Middle English Texts series, offers the most thorough analysis to date of the textual situation surrounding Caxton’s Ovid as a response to the complex late-medieval tradition of Ovidian moralization. Rumrich provides a full and cogent synthesis of the best textual analyses of Caxton’s Ovid, much of which has been inaccessible to English-speaking scholars (most signally, Holger Nøraard’s important 1963 article, in Dutch, on the relationship between Caxton’s translation and the Middle French versions). Rumrich’s edition, positioned as “the first in a project to edit the whole of Caxton’s Ovid,” approaches the text as a close translation but resists the view that it is simply derivative or uninspired (p. xlvi). Instead, Caxton’s Ovid emerges as an encyclopedic mosaic that participates, albeit quietly, in a trend that sees medieval allegorical exegesis moving in a humanist direction; it thus reveals the extent to which, contrary to traditional assumptions of periodization, “medieval and humanist inclinations … coexisted in the fifteenth century” (p. xv). This claim is based on the fact that OM Pr.II (also known as the Burgundian version) differs from the first recension of the prose Ovide Moralisé (the Angevine version)—both of which are descendants of the better-known verse Ovide Moralisé—in its eschewal of Christian allegory and its emphasis on “euhemerist...