Medieval Responses to Ovid's Exile

Explores medieval responses to Ovid's exile, ranging from classical reception in the schoolroom to exilic voices in literature.

Rebecca Menmuir (Author)

9781009553926, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 12 June 2025

262 pages
23.5 x 16.1 x 2.1 cm, 0.53 kg

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Classical history / classical civilisation [HBLA1]