Failed Chastity and Ovid: Myrrha in the Latin Commentary Tradition from Antiquity to the Renaissance1

FAILED CHASTITY AND OVID: MYRRHA IN THE LATIN COMMENTARY TRADITION FROM ANTIQUITY TO THE RENAISSANCE1 Frank T. Coulson The preponderant infl uence of the poetry of Ovid on the artistic and cultural life of Europe from the Carolingian age to the end of the Renaissance has long been recognized, and numerous studies have documented the manner in which the tone, themes, style and ethos of both the amatory poems and Ovid’s epic poem, the Metamorphoses, informed such vernacular poets as Dante in Italian, Chaucer and Shakespeare in English, and the poets of the Pléiade in renaissance France. Here, it is not my purpose to investigate such monumental works of literature as the Commedia, but rather to trace a slenderer, yet in my view no less important thread in the complex tapestry of Ovidian infl uence in the Middle Ages and Renaissance—namely, the Latin school tradition on Ovid and, in particular, the commentaries that were written on the Metamorphoses from 1100 to 1600. These texts, as Alastair Minnis has recently shown in his magisterial study Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c. 1100–c. 1375: The Commentary Tradition,2 are important witnesses to reading practices and literary interpretation during the medieval and humanistic periods. To date, however, these commentaries have not received the attention they deserve for several reasons. First, and perhaps foremost, the basic research necessary to uncover the manuscript witnesses of these texts and place them in their intellectual milieu is ongoing.3 Secondly, the majority of the texts, even 1 I am grateful to Marjorie Curry Woods for comments on an earlier draft of this article. 2 Alastair J. Minnis and A. B. Scott, Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c. 1100– c. 1375: The Commentary Tradition (Oxford, 1988, rev. ed., 1991), now supplemented by Alastair J. Minnis and Ian Johnson, eds., The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 2: The Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2005). 3 For a survey of the manuscript evidence to date see Frank T. Coulson and Bruno Roy, Incipitarium Ovidianum: A Finding Guide for Texts related to the Study of Ovid in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Turnhout, 2000), hereafter cited as Coulson-Roy, and Frank T. Coulson, “Addenda and Corrigenda to Incipitarium Ovidianum,” Journal of Medieval Latin 12 (2002), 154–80. A team of scholars headed by Frank T. Coulson is preparing the VAN DEUSEN_F3-7-36.indd 7 2/7/2008 2:29:08 PM 8 frank t. coulson when known, still lack either diplomatic or critical editions and thus must be read in their original manuscript setting, often from poorly produced microfi lmed copies.4 Finally, the commentaries themselves are most frequently written in a crabbed and highly abbreviated Gothic script (usually a textualis libraria or currens),5 often in the margins of the manuscripts of the poem, and are virtually indecipherable except by those scholars who are professionally trained to read Gothic book hands from 1200 to 1400. In keeping with the theme of this volume of essays, I shall focus my survey of this commentary material on the interpretation of the story of Myrrha from Book Ten of the Metamorphoses. I have selected this particular story as the basis for my investigation for the following reasons. The narrative revolves around a young girl’s failed attempt to remain chaste when confronted with an incestuous passion for her father and thus refl ects the theme of this year’s conference. Secondly, the story of Myrrha is one of Ovid’s longest and most psychologically developed narratives, situated in Book Ten of the epic, where Orpheus, having lost his wife Eurydice, retreats to the mountains of Thrace and narrates the stories of youths loved by the gods ( pueros dilectos superis, Met. 10.152–153) and maidens set afl ame with forbidden passions (inconcessisque puellas ignibus attonitas, Met. 10.153–154 ). Myrrha’s story then becomes embedded in a complexly interwoven thread of narratives that move from the story of Myrrha’s incestuous liaison with her father to that of her son, Adonis, with the goddess Venus. Lastly, the Myrrha story is, from a stylistic point of view, one of Ovid’s fi nest, in which the poet develops to perhaps the highest degree that sardonic humor that caused him to be labeled by the fi rst-century rhetorician Quintilian (Inst. orat. 10.1.88) a nimium amator ingenii sui—“too great a lover of his own cleverness.” * * * Ovid fascicle for publication in volume 10 of the Catalogus translationum et commentariorum: medieval and Renaissance Latin translations and commentaries, ed. Virginia Brown, 8 vols. (Washington, 1960-present). 4 No complete Latin commentary on the Metamorphoses has to date been published. Frank T. Coulson has edited selections from the “Vulgate” commentary (discussed below, pp. 16–19). See his The Vulgate Commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses: the Creation Myth and the Story of Orpheus, edited from Sélestat, Bibliothèque humaniste, MS. 92 (Toronto, 1991). 5 The nomenclature of Gothic scripts is a much vexed question. I follow the system proposed by Albert Derolez in his newly published The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books From the Twelfth to the Early Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 2003). VAN DEUSEN_F3-7-36.indd 8 2/7/2008 2:29:10 PM.

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