The Augustan poet Ovid exerted significant influence over the Middle Ages, and his exile captured the later medieval imagination. Medieval Responses to Ovid’s Exile examines a variety of creative scholastic and literary responses to Ovid’s exile across medieval culture. It ranges across the medieval schoolroom, where new forms shape Ovidian exile anew, literary pilgrimages, medieval fantasies of dismemberment and visits to Ovid’s tomb. These responses capture Ovid’s metamorphosis into a poet for the Christian age, while elsewhere medieval poets such as John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer demonstrate how to inhabit an Ovidian exilic voice. Medieval audiences fundamentally understood the foundations laid by the exilic Ovid, and so from antiquity and from exile Ovid shaped his own reception. The extent, enthusiasm and engagement of medieval responses to Ovid’s exile are to such a degree that they must be considered when we read Ovid’s exilic works, or indeed any of his poetry.

• Develops and extends current theories of reception, moving away from a linear idea of influence and towards a theory of reception as a dialogue
• Challenges the idea of a ‘fractured’ Ovid, showing that in the Middle Ages the mythographer, lover and exilic Ovids were not disconnected but informed each other
• Transcribes, translates, and interprets new material from medieval manuscripts

REBECCA MENMUIR is a Darby Fellow in English Literature at Lincoln College, Oxford, having previously held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Queen Mary University of London. She has published widely on medieval classical reception, forgeries and the medieval schoolroom. She is also the editor of Authenticity in Medieval and Early Modern Literature (forthcoming).

Table des matières :

• Introduction
• Part I. Responding to Exile:
• 1. Ovid’s response
• 2. Forming responses
• 3. Resurrecting Ovid
• Part II. Becoming the Exile:
• 4. Becoming the exile
• 5. John Gower’s Visio Anglie
• 6. Geoffrey Chaucer’s exilic voice
• Epilogue: Forging exile.

Informations pratiques :

Rebecca Menmuir, Medieval Responses to Ovid’s Exile, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2025 ; 1 vol., 262 p. (Classics after Antiquity). ISBN : 978-1-00955-392-6. Prix : GBP 90,00.

Source : Cambridge University Press