Renaissance Postscripts: Responding to Ovid's 'Heroides' in Sixteenth-Century France (review)

Paul White's new study participates in a remarkable resurgence of interest in Ovid's Heroides manifested by a torrent of recent monographs as well as a series of critical editions of individual letters issuing from the Italian publisher Felice Le Monnier. While engaging with all this new scholarship on Ovid, White's book is primarily interested in the Renaissance reception of Ovid's epistolary collection. In some respects his work is a continuation of the researches of Ann Moss and other chroniclers of the Ovidian Renaissance. White frames his inquiry with the notion that the Heroides are really about rewriting and about the modes of reception of a literary text. Consequently, to study the reception of Ovid's poetry is to stay close to the text. This is a plausible approach and one that rightly conjoins Renaissance studies with classical studies. The Heroides do indeed seem to invite imitations, replies, and counterfeits: people are always answering Ovid. White's ambition is to survey this material and to propose a typology of responses to Ovid. As a reference work, Renaissance Postscripts is quite successful. The book comprises an introduction, five chapters, a conclusion, indexes, and a bibliography. The central chapters describe the role of the Heroides in Renaissance education, humanist commentaries on the text, and vernacular translations. The final chapter treats the genre of counter-epistles written in the voices of the heroes to whom Ovid's heroines address their laments. While meticulously researched and agreeably written, the bulk of the work reads like an annotated bibliography. White offers us lots of summary and paraphrase but nothing new or striking in his own words. In fact, the author is so deferential to the work of others and so ecumenical in his citations that it is not clear why he felt the need to write a book of his own. The best chapter of the five is the one on translation, and the best part of this chapter is a comparison of three French versions of Heroides 7, Dido's letter to Aeneas. The discussion of the theory and practice of translation in Octavien de Saint-Gelais, Charles Fontaine, and Joachim Du Bellay is excellent, and the author demonstrates a true poetic sensibility that is held in abeyance elsewhere. Apart from this and a few other highlights, the work remains a checklist of the most salient qualities or characteristics of the various rewritings of Ovid in the French Renaissance. The very thoroughness is tedious. At least the bibliography is serviceable, since it tells us what we can read instead of this book, which is a competent but uninspiring survey of other people's scholarship.