Latin Poems Ascribed to Ovid in the Middle Ages</I>

Mediaevistik 33 . 2020 415

These quibbles should be understood which they inspired, while others have as such, however. Gübele’s book offers charted his role as an inspiration and mo- significant insight into the relationship del to a host of medieval poets, like the between war and religion in the early and eleventh-century author of the elegiac central medieval West, and will prove an love poem known as Versus Eporedien- indispensable guide for anyone interested ses, the subject of a recent book by Marek in the subject. Perhaps most important- Thue Kretschmer, Latin Love Elegy and ly, Gübele lays bare the complicated and the Dawn of the Ovidian Age (Brepols, elusive nature of medieval holy war at a 2020). time in which simplistic, ahistorical ideas A worthy addition to this field of re- about the phenomenon are too often pro- search is the latest volume of the Dum- moted for narrow and often destructive barton Oaks Medieval Library, which political ends. collects “the surviving corpus of pseu- Christopher Landon, do-Ovidiana” (ix), that is, poems falsely Centre for Medieval Studies, University of attributed to Ovid in the Middle Ages. Toronto, [email protected] The title of the book, Appendix Ovidia- na, evokes the Appendix Vergiliana, the title of the collection of works attributed to Virgil in medieval Europe. Unlike that ancient corpus, however, these thirty-four poems ascribed to Ovid had diverse Appendix Ovidiana: Latin Poems Ascri- points of origin in time and did not travel bed to Ovid in the Middle Ages, ed. together in medieval manuscripts until Ralph Hexter, Laura Pfuntner, and Jus- the thirteenth century. tin Haynes. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval The volume presents these pseu- Library, 62. Cambridge, MA: Harvard do-Ovidian poems chronologically, but University Press, 2020, 510 pp. since their provenance is difficult to es- The medieval reception of the Roman tablish, the editors have organized them poet Ovid (43 B.C.E.-17 C.E.) is a field of according to their earliest manuscript historical inquiry that has advanced with attestation with Ovid named as their au- focused yet feverish industry in modern thor. The collection begins with two late scholarship. Already in 1881, Ludwig antique summaries of Virgil’s poems Traube recognized Ovid alongside Virgil (one dedicated solely to the Aeneid, the and Horace as one of the three most in- other encompassing the Eclogues and the fluential classical poets among medieval Georgics as well). These were products readers and christened the twelfth and of late antiquity, but their association thirteenth centuries as the “age of Ovid” with Ovid took place in the Carolingi- (aetas Ovidiana) because it was during an age. Their purpose was “to express this time that his work was most widely and inscribe Ovid’s subordinate status imitated. In the past few decades, scho- in every manuscript of Virgil in which lars like Frank Coulson and his students they appear” (xiii) at a time when Ovid’s have traced the far-reaching influence of work was still suspect among monastic Ovid’s poems in medieval schools, espe- readers. Early medieval authors also link­ cially through the commentary traditions ed Ovid to verses on the qualities of fish 416 Mediaevistik 33 . 2020 and animals, a poem comprising adjecti- many did not circulate together until the ves describing the god Pan, and The Wal- later Middle Ages, but they were clearly nut Tree, a charming 182-line exercise popular with medieval readers from the described by the editors as “stylistically Carolingian age onwards. Second, the as- the most Ovidian of the poems in this sociation of these poems with Ovid was collection” (xiv). The renewed interest in related to their content rather than their Ovid in the schools accounts for a rise form. Few of these poems are Ovidian in poems attributed to him in the twelfth in terms of their technical expression as century. These include verses on animals works of poetry. Ovid had his emulators (On the Cuckoo; On the Nightingale; and in the Middle Ages, but those poets are a verse bestiary known as The Wonders not the focus of this volume. The asso- of the World) as well as satires with na- ciation forged between these works and tural themes, like On the Wolf (a thinly the Roman poet in the minds of medie- veiled critique of rapacious monks) and val scribes was based primarily on their the delightful On the Lombard and the thematic content, usually love or some Snail, about a farmer waging war against aspect of the natural world. a garden pest. The decades around 1200 This volume is a welcome addition to witness a darker turn in this tradition. the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library. Drawing on themes of misogyny alrea- Like Volume 18 of this series – One dy present in Ovid’s authentic works, we Hundred Latin Hymns from Ambrose to find his name attached to poems about Aquinas (ed. and trans. Peter Walsh with seduction and rape, including On the Christopher Husch, Harvard University Crafty Messenger and On the Old Wo- Press, 2012) – it presents a curated antho- man, the longest poem in the book. The logy of texts, rather than an authentic me- editors are right to conclude that these dieval source. The editors have crafted a poems “describe a space that not merely very helpful introduction that contextua- perpetuates but gives license to a parti- lizes each of the poems and explains how cularly obnoxious and brutish form of medieval scribes related them to Ovid. male dominance, especially in the area As a result, the rationale for this collecti- of sex” (xviii). In the later Middle Ages, on of pseudo-Ovidiana and its importan- Ovid’s name clung to a number of poems ce for understanding the reception histo- that reflected the amatory themes of his ry of Ovid in the Middle Ages are clear. authentic works, as well as Ovidian epi- Scholars of medieval Latin poetry will sodes like the fourteenth-century Meta- appreciate this collection of poems attri- morphosis of a Priest into a Rooster. buted to Ovid, which brings together in Several insights emerge from consi- one place many otherwise obscure pieces dering these pseudo-Ovidian poems as of late antique and medieval Latin verse a corpus. First, they were legion. Ac- that share an association with the famed cording to the editors, “[t]he number of Roman poet. manuscripts that contain at least one of Scott G. Bruce, the works in the pseudo-Ovidian family Department of History, Dealy Hall 614, is roughly four hundred” (xxiii). Some Fordham University, Bronx, NY 10458; were not as well known as others and [email protected]