Medieval Metamorphoses: Ovid in the Middle Ages

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Ovid's Metamorphoses enjoyed a wide circulation from Late Antiquity through the Middle Ages, and the poem's influence on later Latin poets such as Claudian and Ausonius as well as vernacular authors like Chrétien de Troyes, Dante, John Gower, Petrarch, and Chaucer remains unparalleled. This course will focus on the ways the Metamorphoses was read over time spanning its literal, allegorical, historical, and moral interpretations. A survey of major Ovidian expositors and commentators such as Ps-Lactantius, Arnulf of Orléans, the "Vulgate" Commentator, John of Garland, Giovanni del Virgilio, and Pierre Bersuire will illustrate the poem's movement throughout different contexts and milieus. We will read selections of the Metamorphoses together with medieval texts to understand the exegetical workings of paratextual genres such as glosulae, tituli, allegoriae, integumenta, and prose paraphrases. This course also has a material culture component where students will work with manuscripts and early printed books which transmit Ovidian paratexts to further appreciate the utilitarian traditions of the objects in tandem with the texts used to explicate perhaps the most stylistically innovative Roman poem ever written. Recommended for students who have completed intermediate Latin.