Ovid’s Wand: the brush of history and the mirror of ekphrasis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Reid Hardaway, M.A. Graduate Program in English The Ohio State University 2017 Dissertation Committee: Ethan Knapp, Advisor Karen Winstead Sarah-Grace Heller Copyright by Reid Hardaway 2017 Abstract The recent work on the manuscript reception of Ovid’s canon and Ovidian commentaries in western Europe has affirmed the author’s significant literary influence in the late Mid- dle Ages. The production and reception of Ovidinia flourished, and Ovid’s poems in- creasingly became read as coherent compositions rather than dissected for bits of moral exempla. In particular, the Metamorphoses profoundly affects the literary landscape of late medieval France and England. Allusions to Ovid’s poem reemerge throughout the late Middle Ages at defining moments of poetic self-consciousness, most often through figures of ekphrasis, the use of poetry in order to portray other media of art. By examin- ing such moments from a selection of influential medieval poems, the mind of the late medieval poet reveals itself in perpetual contestation with the images and figures of an Ovidian lineage, but the contest entails the paradoxical construction of poetic identity, which forces the poet to impose the haunting shadow of literary history onto the mirror of his or her craft. ii Acknowledgements The following work would not have been possible without the considerate and insightful assistance of my advisor, Ethan Knapp, as well as the other members of the dissertation committee, Karen Winstead and Sarah-Grace Heller. Additionally, I could not have fin- ished this without the emotional support of my friends and family and, most of all, my mother. iii Vita 2008…………………………………B.A. English, The University of South Carolina 2011………………………………….M.A English, The University of South Carolina 2012 to present ………………………. Ph.D. Candidate, The Ohio State University Publications “Huckleberry Finn, American Secularist.” Free Inquiry 31 (April/March, 2011). “A Fallen Language and the Consolation of Art in The Book of the Duchess.” The Chaucer Review 50 (2015). Major Field: English iv Table of Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………..ii Acknowledgements………………………………………………..…………………….iii Vita………………………………………………………………………………………iv Chapter 1: A Preface on Ovidian Ekphrasis and its Medieval Foundations …………….1 Chapter 2: Tristan: an early witness to Ovidian ethics …………………………..…….32 Chapter 3: Sir Orfeo’s Harp, Ovidian Relic ………………………………………..…..68 Chapter 4: A Fallen Language and the Consolation of Art in The Book of the Duchess.105 Chapter 5: Fear and Loathing in The House of Fame ……………………..……………..132 Chapter 6: Reflections and the Mirror of Ekphrasis………………………………………172 References………………………………………………………………………………190 v Chapter 1: A Preface on Ovidian Ekphrasis and its Medieval Foundations Ovid’s Metamorphoses gave medieval Europe a comprehensive encyclopedia for ancient mythology. For some of its audience, a handy reference work proved to be the limit of the poem’s relevance. Moralist commentators and allegorically minded preachers culled the poem with almost complete indifference to the framed narrative, and they largely ignored the cosmic structure of the poem. Ovid’s introductory cosmogony contextualizes the poem’s structural framework within a cyclical form. In the end, the poem culminates with Ovid constructing his own authorial identity, where his self- conscious poetic identity performs a creative role in the narrative’s cosmic history. Throughout the narrative, instruments will sing and play their own origin stories, and ekphrasis, a representation of art in a different medium, helps reveal the latent anxiety that the author has toward his or her labor. Because of Ovid’s thematic obsession with artistic ontology, his influence on late medieval poetry compelled a new imagination of authorial identity and self-consciousness. Far from being simply a reference work for so many of its medieval readers, Ovid’s Metamorphoses gave poets an expansive awareness for the representations which their instruments simultaneously reflected and invented. Patterson argued that the classical tradition made medieval poets more sensitive to their constructive role within a historical and prophetic legacy: But the classics do provide Chaucer with two things: first, a form of writing that allows for meaningfulness – for interpretability – while resisting the preemptive hermeneutics of allegorical exegesis; and second, a prospect upon life that is capacious and synoptic but not dismissively transcendental – in other words, a historiography. For Chaucer, as for many other medieval readers, the !1 classical poets, and especially Virgil and Statius, were essentially historians; and they provided him with a historical vision that allowed him to step outside the suffocating narcissism of court makyng and to recognize the mutual interdependence of subjectivity and history.1 Patterson demonstrated how classical influence informed Chaucer’s understanding of a “synoptic” history, emerging from a poetic tradition where cosmic time provides the temporal framework for mythological narrative. In deferring to Ovid as a model for influence (peering above the “narcissism of court makyng,” as Patterson argued, which relied on generic and local forms of aristocratic conformity), Chaucer appropriates antique structural devices for the service of his own legacy. Patterson’s arguments will prove essential in the poems I examine throughout the dissertation. However, Patterson’s neglect of Ovid is precisely the sort of scholarly oversight I hope to rectify. And though I am suggesting that Patterson’s disregard reveals a more general problem, the passage I have just cited has itself proven to be deeply influential on Chaucerian scholarship. The theoretical understanding of classical influence on Chaucer relies on the biographical fantasies of specifically “Virgil and Statius,” which have been quite exaggerated in importance, especially when compared to the significance of Ovid’s literary canon and biography. The influence of Ovid’s cosmogony extends through successive eras, and the opening of the Metamorphoses finds echoes through the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance: In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora; di, coeptis (nam vos mutastis et illas) adspirate meis primaque ab origine mundi 1. Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 61. !2 ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen! Ante mare et terras et quod tegit omnia caelum unus erat toto naturae vultus in orbe, quem dixere chaos: rudis indigestaque moles nec quicquam nisi pondus iners congestaque eodem non bene iunctarum discordia semina rerum.2 (Metamorphoses I, 1-9) (The will of my spirit bears to speak on forms transfigured into new bodies. Gods, as you changed and changed all things, favor what I have begun and take my song from the beginning of the world until the end of my time. Before the water and the ground, before sky covered everything, one aspect of nature was over the entire globe: Chaos, a disordered, unrefined pile, nothing there but crude weight and, likewise, the discordant seeds of misfits.) Ovid’s epic opens in discord. The atoms that compose the essence of existence war with one another in a universe of antagonism and division. But as similar features start to align, a sense of order appears to emerge: Hanc deus et melior litem natura diremit. nam caelo terras et terris abscidit undas et liquidum spisso secrevit ab aere caelum. quae postquam evolvit caecoque exemit acervo, dissociate locis concordi pace ligavit (Metamorphoses I, 21-25) (A god, or perhaps something kinder, ended this contention, for he cut lands out of the sky, waves from the lands, and he divided the translucent sky from the dense air. After he unrolled everything, removing all from the vacuous mass, he bound what was removed into place, into harmonic peace.) If this passage concluded the poem’s cosmogony, then the ethical framework would imply a linear dynamic that leads toward an unalterable “harmonic peace.” Such a structure would seem closer to Hesiod and Vergil rather than Homer or Callimachus. But 2 Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. Frank Justus Miller (London: Harvard University Press, 1984). Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own. !3 Ovid’s world declines, and humanity cannot turn away, and the painful realization of Heraclitean loss makes the imagination of history a possibility. I will attempt to demonstrate that Ovid is the root Patterson was searching for, the alpha to the late medieval imagination of history, and by consequence time, which, as a cyclical fantasy, contains its own omega: Far from being a straightforward linear development, the history of Theban writing is what Chaucer in the Boece calls a “replicacioun of wordes ... to enter upon it is to broach a labyrinthine way, “so entrelaced that it is unstable to ben unlaced” ... Theban writing simultaneously salves and reopens the wound caused by “the poynt of remembraunce;” and Chaucer, by invoking Thebes as an early and recurrent locus of his own work, and as a metaphor for his own poetics of memory, sets himself in a relationship with origins.3 The appeal of antiquity in the late Middle Ages made it difficult to, at any point, repress Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The poem nonetheless celebrates its own immoral transgressions. Still, the