Ovid in the Age of Cervantes ed. by Frederick A. De Armas (review)

In the final lines of the Metamorphoses, Ovid states that the completion of his poem will afford him perpetual life, in the form of a lasting fame and an indelible name. Ovid’s eternal rebirth, the text specifies, is connected not only to his having generated a work “which neither Jove’s anger, nor fire, nor sword, nor devouring age will be able to destroy” but also to the fact that his perpetuum carmen will continue to be read (hence, one could argue, to be transformed) after his bodily demise. Besides characterizing poetic making as a process of transmitting life, the conclusive lines of Metamorphoses metonymically conflate the figure of the poet and the product of his work. “With the better part of me,” Ovid says toward the end of book 15, “I shall be born forever,” because throughout the ages “I shall be read.”

Ovid’s literary afterlife, the reception of his work, and the fabrication of his authorial persona in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, are at the center of Ovid in the Age of Cervantes. This collection of fifteen essays focuses on a variety of textual documents connected, in one way or another, to either the figure of the Roman poet, his work, or both. As Frederick De Armas underlines in his preface, the deliberate avoidance of the expression “Golden Age” in the title of the book aims at demonstrating awareness of the political and ideological implications inscribed into its usage for propagandistic purposes (promoted, for instance, by Spanish rulers and regimes). The alternative provided by the expression “early modern” likewise appears to be problematic at some level, because it might lead us to a diminished understanding of the past, the book’s editor argues, as “an appendage to a ‘better’ and more recent age” (xi).

Ovid in the Age of Cervantes is divided into four parts. The first section is titled “Alternatives, Diagnoses, and Translations.” It contains four essays reviewing a number of cases of reception and transformation of Ovid’s work in medieval and early modern Spain. Besides touching on those anonymous texts that, having been falsely attributed to Ovid, attest to the Roman poet’s enduring “afterlife,” Ryan Giles scrutinizes the ambivalent influences of the Remedia amoris on medical writing and satirical literature of the time. John Parrack looks at the annotated translation of the Metamorphoses compiled by Pedro Sánchez de Viana, observing how this writer uses his own “literary genius” (33) to attempt to compete with Ovid in mastering classical subjects. In turn, Marina Brownlee reads Torquemada’s Jardín de flores curiosas as an encyclopedia of exotica featuring Ovidian myths that are informed by early modern concerns about science and empirical knowledge. In the essay that concludes the section, the book’s editor focuses on the influence of Ovid’s Fasti on Spanish literature from 1540 to 1648. De Armas juxtaposes four written compendia that, while confronting “the mysteries of antiquity” (69), share an evident concern with Ovid’s treatment of the figure of Janus.

Part 2 of the collection is dedicated to Cervantes’ own appropriation and transformation of the Ovidian sources. It is made up of three essays, all of which are centered on the relationships between the Metamorphoses and Don Quijote. Timothy Ambrose suggests that the Spanish writer “had Ovid in mind” (76) when he was writing El curioso impertinente, an interpolated novella that is contained in chapters 33–35 of part 1 of Don Quijote. Scrutinizing Cervantes’ telling of the episode of the fulling hammers (in chapter 20 of part 1 of Don Quijote), keith Budner suggests that the Spanish writer depicts the Iron Age in a way that evokes Ovid’s understanding of Vulcan’s ugly industry rather than the valor of the warlike Mars. William Worden analyses how, throughout his novel, Cervantes manipulates a number of Ovidian accounts of metamorphosis in order to question the epistemological status as well as “the very nature...