Metamorphosis: The Changing Face of Ovid in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (review)

The fifteen essays in this volume (a number that is correct at one point on the back cover and wrong immediately below it) derive originally from a conference held in Toronto during the 2004–2005 academic year on the theme of "Metamorphosis." The collection begins with an essay titled somewhat misleadingly "After Ovid: Classical, Medieval, and Early Modern Receptions of the Metamorphoses," in which the editors provide a useful overview of Ovidian reception in antiquity but then cover the last two periods with a four-page summary of the volume's contents. This introductory essay is followed by a tour-de-force in which Frank Coulson draws on a lifetime's work to show why it is necessary to devote careful attention to the manuscripts of Ovidian commentaries in medieval France, which he divides into four groups: scholastic (primarily philological), ethical (primarily allegorical), philosophical and scientific, and composite (which unite the perspectives of philology, allegory, and literary criticism). This essay sets up nicely the way the commentaries will be used in the following papers.

Three essays are devoted to Christian allegory in the Ovide moralisé, especially in works by Christine de Pizan. Marilynn Desmond hits head-on the awkward discrepancy between the vindictive, vicious behavior of Ovid's gods and the assumption of divine exemplarity that Christian readers brought to the Metamorphoses; focusing on the myth of Actaeon, Desmond shows that in the illustrated manuscripts of the Ovide moralisé, text and image often work in contrast, with the former linking pagan and Christian value codes and the latter highlighting contrasts between them. Suzanne Conklin Akbari proposes that in Mutacion de Fortune, Christine de Pizan's use of metaphor can be understood in terms of Ovidian metamorphosis, while Patricia Zalamea examines Chemin de lonc estude and concludes, along with Desmond, that there is often a tension between word and image in the manuscripts prepared under Christine's supervision.

The next four articles are devoted to Ovid's reception in medieval and early modern England. Kathryn McKinley argues that in the Confessio amantis, Gower uses the myths of Jason and Medea and Tereus and Procne to issue a veiled warning to King Richard II to keep his word, relying more on Ovid's textual emphases than on those of his medieval commentators. In tracing the influence of the Metamorphoses on the Canterbury Tales, Jamie Fumo suggests that the Wife of Bath draws on Ovid's storytelling to subvert auctoritas, first by comparing her husbands to the blinded Argus, then by botching the myth of Midas' ears. The latter pair of essays in this group extends the discussion to texts traditionally considered nonliterary, with Thomas Willard surveying the reception of Ovid as a philosopher of alchemy and Cora Fox tracing the presence of Ovid in Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), where Scot associates modern witches with Medea and Daphne, using the Metamorphoses as an authoritative source on witchcraft at the same time as he asserts that such accounts cannot possibly be true.

Three articles trace the reception of individual characters from the Metamorphoses in Italian literature and art. Gur Zak offers a new way of describing the tension in Petrarch's Secretum, suggesting that Augustine's position reflects his rejection of the Narcissus myth and Franciscus's the inability to pull away from all that Narcissus represents. Cynthia Nazarian compares the use of Ovid's Actaeon in Petrarch's Rime and Maurice Scève's Délie, with Scève re-Ovidianizing Petrarch's dismembered Actaeon. Julia Branna Perlman, finally, examines the Venus and Cupid designed by Michelangelo and executed by Pontormo, suggesting that painting and text both share a concern with the comparison and competition between the visual and verbal arts.

The last three essays focus on the seventeenth century, two in Iberia, one in England. R. John McCaw focuses on Ovid's Phaethon...