Ovid in the Age of Cervantes (review)

Although Hispanists such as Carolyn Nadeau, Marcia Wells, María Rosa Lida de Malkiel, Antonio Martín Rodríguez, and Frederick de Armas have shown how pivotal Golden Age Spain’s investment was in Antiquity for its political perceptions and literary formulations, the widely-invoked classical figure of Ovid in Spain has not been the subject of a critical monograph since Rudolph Schevill’s Ovid and the Renaissance in Spain in 1913. The present collection aims to fill that gap, by foregrounding Ovidian subtexts and undertones in canonic and non-canonic writers alike.

As this volume shows, Cervantes and his fellow writers recognized the Roman poet not only as a main interpreter of classical myth, but also as the emblematic icon of an era that crowned literary achievement as effusively as it punished political and/or moral misconduct. It could be said that Spaniards found in two aspects of Ovid’s life, his rivalry with Virgil and his sad end as an exile, a cautionary reference to their own literary and political ambitions and anxieties. De Armas has selected a wide variety of essays that explores the value and fortune of the Spanish literary tributes to works like Metamorphosis, the Remedia amoris (Ryan D. Giles), Fasti (de Armas), and Tristia. The variety of approaches is refreshing, from the traditional reception and influence of specific works, studied in Part I, to the re-elaboration of themes such as madness, desire, doubt, and self-knowledge in Cervantes (Part II) and in other writers of the age (Part III). Finally, Part IV examines Ovid as a prime model for literary and political self-construction.

In the first part, Ryan Giles deals with the influence and reception of Remedia amoris and the Ars Amatoria in both medical writing and satirical literature in the late Middle Ages. Certainly, the interrelation of these discourses and their influence in works such as Andrea Capellanus’s De Amore, Juan Ruiz’s Libro del Buen Amor, and Juan de Rojas’s La Celestina cemented Ovid’s influence as a literary foundation for Cervantes and his contemporaries. The second essay, by John C. Parrack, delves into the complex world of translations and annotations of the Metamorphosis in the sixteenth century. Of the many authors focused on this goal, Parrack dedicates particular attention to Pedro Sánchez de Viana (1589), an adventurous commentator less interested in textual exegesis than in literary emulation. The next essay is especially significant. Marina Brownlee shows how an author like Antonio de Torquemada elicits in his Jardín de flores curiosas (1568) the transformative power of Ovidian myth. Like Pedro Sánchez de Viana, Torquemada also manipulated Ovid’s fables, but he did so in this case to fit his own distinct socio-political and epistemological needs. Thus through a religious and/or scientific logic, and a deep investment in surrounding politics, questions regarding the birth of a colored offspring from a white family are not explained through the misbehavior of the gods, but as a social and political commentary intimately connected to the ongoing Morisco rebellion. The last essay of this first section, by Frederick de Armas, fittingly associates Ovid with Janus, the god of thresholds and double visions (66). De Armas shows how Janus becomes an ideal motif for authors like Pedro Mexía’s Silva de varia lección (1540–50), Juan Pérez de Moya’s Philosophia secreta (1585), Bartolomé Jiménez Patón’s Elocuencia española en el arte (1604–21), and Baltasar Gracián’s Agudeza y arte de ingenio (1642–48), who are interested in looking at the past of Antiquity to find the projections of their present and future.

The first essay of the second group—dedicated to Ovid in Cervantes—studies Cervantes’s interpolated novel El curioso impertinente and finds it intimately connected to Book 3 of the Metamorphosis—concretely in the intertwined stories of Tiresias, and Narcissus. While it is easy to see how the question of knowledge, or what is known and...