The Lives of Ovid in Seventeenth-Century French Culture by Helena Taylor (review)

At the height of his popularity in seventeenth-century France, Ovid was celebrated as much for his life, as the playful poet of love and metamorphosis who was exiled for a mysterious combination of literary and political causes, as for his works. In this richly detailed and original study, Helena Taylor explores seventeenth-century narrative constructions of Ovid’s life and the ideological, political, and aesthetic uses to which they were put. In the process, she illuminates broader cultural shifts within the Querelle des anciens et des modernes, focusing particularly on writers sidelined from the classical canon as female, galant, or moderne. The opening chapter carefully traces the influential historiographical tradition of Ovid’s life, from his own account in the Tristia, in which his shifting authorial persona conflates biography with fiction, inviting and dismissing biographical interpretation of his works, to the seventeenth century, as life-writing moves away from humanist scholarship and towards more innovative vies galantes. The second chapter considers the provocative functions of seventeenth-century translations of Ovid, seen as metamorphoses faithful to his spirit as a poet of change. It demonstrates how translators’ prefaces use Ovid to promote the art of translation, while modernes use burlesque inversions of Ovid to subvert canonical hierarchies governing literary taste, and translators of Ovid’s love poetry for a refined, female aesthetic use his ambiguous morality to test the tension between eroticism and bienséance in galanterie. Chapter 3 provides a subtle analysis of the histoire galante, and particularly of Mme de Villedieu’s Les Exilez de la cour d’Auguste. Villedieu’s sceptical characterization of a licentious Ovide, highlighting the proximity between polite and predatory galanterie, accompanies a more sympathetically Ovidian blurring of fact and imagination, and of the value of à clé reading, that comments critically on power and the writer’s position in a political and cultural climate of gossip and scandal. Chapter 4 concentrates on Ovid as an exile writer seeking to redeem himself before Augustus through the same writing that prompted his banishment, as he laments his exile and aggressively parades poetry’s power to control historical narrative. Comparison of the complex and ambiguously Ovidian strategies, self-identification, and authorial personae of two exiled writers, Théophile de Viau and Bussy-Rabutin, shows how they seek to restore their reputations and gain narrative control over their disgrace. The final chapter discusses Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire, which uses the mystery behind Ovid’s exile to explore wider scepticism about knowledge, authority, and the limitations of historiography. Bayle reads Ovid as he would like all historical narratives to be read: he appreciates Ovid’s invitation to imaginative interpretation, and encourages equally speculative readings of his own work, through internal contradictions and inconclusive arguments that open Ovid’s life to new interpretations and leave narrative questions unresolved. Overall, this scholarly and engaging book valuably demonstrates how early modern writers use Ovid’s doubly paradoxical status—as an ancient poet who forms modern culture, and as an exile who questions authority even as he adorns Versailles—to position themselves within a changing literary culture and to reflect on their own possible afterlives.