. When the name of the sophisticated Roman poet of the Augustan age is mentioned in conjunction with medieval France, most scholars think of the Ovide moralisé, a text from the first half of the 14th century. In fact, Ovid’s works—from the mainly mythological miracles narrated in the Metamorphoses to the early erotic elegiacs—were copied, imitated, glossed, and interpreted throughout the Middle Ages. While the 12th century is often referred to as an Ovidian era (aetas Ovidiana) the majority of the principal surviving Ovid manuscripts were copied from the 9th to the 11th century. Dozens of Metamorphoses manuscripts with commentaries, however, survive from the 12th and 13th centuries.
The prodigious influence of Ovid as a model in 12th-century imaginative literature is obvious in troubadour, Goliardic, and Latin school verse; in the early Romances of Antiquity; and in the works of Chrétien de Troyes (who himself claims to have translated the Ars amatoria) and other French romances; and it can be perceived in minor works like the Latin Love-Council of Remiremont (Veris in temporibus sub Aprilis idibus), a 12th-century poetical debate, and the De vetula, a pseudo-Ovidian tale. More specifically, it is through complex love metaphors that Ovid’s presence may be gauged in narratives like the Old French Roman d’Énéas, an anonymous, free mid-12th-century adaptation of Virgil’s Aeneid. In Chrétien de Troyes’s Cligés, both the psychological penetration of the extended love analyses and the irony derive from Ovid’s elegiac poems. The same holds true for a poignant text like Marie de France’s Guigemar, one of her brief lais that is unquestionably suffused with Ovidian imagery.
Ovid’s daringly original poetry, at once cosmological in scope and trivial in grasp, dominates western vernacular tradition. For Chaucer, he was “Venus’ Clerk”; the notion of romantic love, which arises from the medieval idea of courtly love, goes back in large part to the Roman poet’s conception of the mutually transforming power of this human emotion. Ancient Ovidian stories, such as those of Pyramus and Thisbe, Narcissus, and Philomela, help to establish the new narrative medieval genre in the vernacular: they were adapted into Old French, then appeared in German, Dutch, Italian, and early English versions. The vogue continued into Renaissance art and poetry.
While reworkings of Ovid’s multifaceted Metamorphoses began before the Carolingian period, the most ambitious and elaborate treatment is found in two anonymous French translations, which were then vigorously amplified into Christian exegetical moralization, the Ovide moralisé. This 72,000-line poem, with its complex web of allegorical interpretation, may be said to attempt a reconciliation of the Metamorphoses with orthodox Christian doctrine. It is in this special dress that Ovid reached Boccaccio, Chaucer, Gower, Christine de Pizan, and numerous other later poets. Indeed, Pierre Bersuire, one of Ovid’s translators (from the Old French back into Latin), calls the Metamorphoses a bible of pagan gods.
Cormier, Raymond J., ed. and trans. Three Ovidian Tales of Love (Piramus et Tisbé, Narcisus et Dané, and Philomena et Procné). New York: Garland, 1986.
Munari, Franco. Ovid im Mittelalter. Zurich: Artemis, 1960.
Rand, Edward Kennard. Ovid and His Influence. Boston: Jones, 1925.
OVIDE MORALISÉ
. A poem of some 72,000 lines in octosyllabic couplets, composed between 1316 and 1328 by an anonymous cleric, probably a Franciscan. The language suggests that the writer was of Burgundian origin. The poem survives in nineteen manuscripts, one of which contains only a fragment.
The Ovide moralist is a translation and paraphrase of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, augmented by extensive commentary on the Ovidian text. The commentary offers moral, allegorical, and theological interpretations of Ovid’s tales. Each tale of the Metamorphoses is translated and then expounded, the division between tale and exposition usually signaled by an interjection like “Now I would like briefly to expound the meaning of this fable.” The expositions are rarely brief, however: they are typically as long as the paraphrases of the Ovidian narratives themselves. Plainly, the exegetical function takes precedence. The Ovide moralisé in effect presents a vernacular synthesis of sacred and secular exegetical traditions. The sources of the poem, aside from the Metamorphoses, are the Bible, biblical commentary, Ovidian commentary of the 12th and 13th centuries (e.g., the allegorical commentary by Arnulf of Orléans, the Integumenta Ovidii by jean de Garlande, and many anonymous glosses), Ovid’s other works (Heroides, Fastes), the tradition of mythography from late antiquity and the earlier Middle Ages (Servius, Fulgentius, Hyginus, Vatican mythographers), as well as medieval Homeric lore (Ilias Latina, De excidio Trojae historia). The Ovide moralisé also incorporates French material: for the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, the poet inserts a version in Norman French, which he acknowledges as the work of another; and for the tale of Philomela, he uses a version that he attributes to a “Chrestiiens li Gois,” whom some scholars identify as Chrétien de Troyes.
There are many reasons for the popularity of this poem among medieval readers, not the least of which was the vernacular access that it gave to a tradition of classical learning. Later vernacular poets, among them Guillaume de Machaut, Eustache Deschamps, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and Christine de Pizan, derived mythographic information from this French poem. At least three French prose abridgments were made during the 15th century, including one printed by Colard Mansion of Bruges in 1484; another of these prose versions was translated into English prose by William Caxton in 1480. The Ovide moralisé also found a learned audience. The Benedictine monk Pierre Bersuire used it for the second redaction (1342) of his Latin prose Ovidius moralizatus (originally Book 15 of his Reductium morale\ an important mythographic reference into the early 16th century. By any account, the Ovide moralisé is the most extensive and influential medieval French treatment of Ovid.
The poem’s method of commentary is a mixture of learned exegetical tradition and popular didacticism. The Ovide moralisé is most indebted to learned tradition in its allegorical approach to pagan myth: since late antiquity, Neoplatonist exegetes had interpreted mythical or fabulous narratives as allegorical “covers” for moral or philosophical truths. The Ovide moralisé combines such moral readings with theological interpretations of Ovid’s text, discovering signs and symbols of Christian history and spirituality in Ovid’s text. The poet never implies that Ovid himself was a Christian. Rather, he exploits the Pauline doctrine that “all that is written is for our instruction.” He suggests that it is God who puts divine meaning in all writing, that Ovid told the stories, and that a good and inspired exegete like himself can discover the moral and spiritual profit that these stories contain. Thus, for example, the story of Phaeton (Metamorphoses 2.1–328) is treated as follows. First is the narrative itself, with some amplification of details; then a historical explanation of the Phaeton myth interpreted as the memory of a summer heat that devastated Ethiopia; then a euhemeristic explanation of Phaeton himself as an astronomer whose writings were destroyed and who threw himself off a high mountain. The fall of Phaeton is then compared with that of Lucifer, so that the Phaeton myth is read as moral advice against the dangers of pride in great undertakings. But the interpretation shifts to a theological theme. The palace of the sun is the throne of glory, where the holy Trinity sits. The sun is Christ; the chariot represents Christian doctrine; the horses are the Evangelists; the driver is the pope, who must not aspire to that office through ambition. Phaeton is also read as the Antichrist, who tries to corrupt humanity but is foiled by God.
In this pluralistic system of interpretation, we have the textual attitude of Neoplatonist mythography, where the text is seen as polyvalent, that is, capable of yielding up many meanings. The popularity of the Ovide moralisé lies largely in the poet’s success in adapting the critical system of moral mythography to vernacular literary interests in Ovid’s stories. The poem at once provides a comprehensive rendering of Ovidian lore and elaborates a moral justification for such pagan fictions.
