Ovid in the Middle Ages

About this book

"Ovid is perhaps the most important surviving Latin poet and his work has influenced writers throughout Europe to the present day. This volume presents a groundbreaking series of essays on his reception across Europe in the Middle Ages. The collection includes contributions from distinguished Ovidians as well as leading specialists in medieval Latin and vernacular literature, clerical and extra-clerical culture and medieval art, and addresses questions of manuscript and textual transmission, translation, adaptation and imitation. It also explores the intersecting cultural contexts of the schools (monastic and secular), courts and the literate lay households. It elaborates the scale and scope of the enthusiasm for Ovid in medieval Europe, following readers of the canon from the Carolingian monasteries to the early schools of the Île de France and on into clerical and curial milieus in Italy, Spain, the British Isles and even the Byzantine Empire"-- "Medieval Europe was shaped not in separation from antiquity -- as the polemics of the Renaissance alleged -- but in the light of its enduring presence. The cultural, social, economic and political fabric of Christendom was woven with the patterns of the classical world. The people of the West acknowledged, or aspired to, the status of the Latins, they submitted to the authority of competing forms -- princely and pontifical -- of an ancient imperium and they set their confessional, cultural and political boundaries on the same eastern frontier as their Roman forebears. Perhaps above all they appropriated the discourse of the ancients and the textual culture(s), learned, literary, public and personal, that had sustained it for so long"--