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Reframing the Metamorphoses: the Enabling of Political Allegory in Late Medieval Ovidian Narrative D

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Reframing the Metamorphoses: the Enabling of Political Allegory in Late Medieval Ovidian Narrative D Reframing the Metamorphoses: The Enabling of Political Allegory in Late Medieval Ovidian Narrative Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Amanda J. Gerber Graduate Program in English The Ohio State University 2011 Dissertation Committee: Lisa J. Kiser, Advisor Frank Coulson Ethan Knapp Copyright by Amanda J. Gerber 2011 Abstract This study develops a critical method for reading the vernacular frame narratives of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate based on the grammar-school commentaries that taught them classical rhetoric, philology, and history. In the course of developing this method, I answer the following questions: why do the school texts and vernacular works exist in the same format? Why is it that Christian writers appropriate the structuring principles of Ovid’s pagan Metamorphoses for their works? Furthermore, what inspired England’s obsession with Ovidian narrative structure during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries? Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, to name just a few, participated in this Ovidian vogue— attempting to capture the Roman’s sinister and playful voice and, more specifically, to master the frame-narrative device that gave it critical direction. Seeing Ovid’s collection of pagan myths as a cohesive and continuous poem, medieval commentators uncovered an argument about abuses of power. Vernacular writers adopted this approach to Ovid, interpreting his work as a model for literary navigation in a historically turbulent period. I hereby alter the assumption that medieval writers mined classical literature merely as sources for their compilations of exempla with which to practice moralizing strategies. Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and their literate contemporaries would have learned in school that the Metamorphoses was a text replete with masterful grammar, ii syntax, and rhetoric—but also with drama, subversion, and political intrigue. Schoolmasters generated an affinity for the Metamorphoses by emphasizing how Ovid the exile depicted a corrupt empire that maintained its dominance by removing discordant subjects; and these instructors showed that Ovid represented such hegemonic abuses by repeatedly relaying myths in which outliers are physically transformed in order to silence them. Thus the peculiar character of medieval education, which achieved literacy through the reading of non-Christian texts, concatenated not only Ovid’s separate myths but also the pagan political past to their own politically charged Christian present. Understanding this overlap between classical and late medieval vernacular literature reveals a sophisticated rhetorical education that engaged with classical poesy in a manner that is generally attributed only to later humanist writers. iii For my parents. iv Acknowledgements I am extremely grateful to Professor Lisa J. Kiser, who has been a constant source of wise counsel, tireless assistance, and warm encouragement for the past six years—without which this project would have been impossible for me to complete. I have also been incredibly fortunate to work with Professor Frank T. Coulson, who has offered me his expertise and generous attention, which gave my dissertation direction. I am also indebted to the insights of Ethan Knapp, whose questions pushed me to envision the implications of my work. Furthermore, I would like to thank the English Department for funding my work and its professors who have shaped and supported my scholarship. I have particularly benefitted from the advice and assistance of the Department’s chair, Professor Richard Dutton, the recommendations and contributions of Professor Christopher A. Jones and Professor Richard Firth Green, as well as the encouragement and advice of Professor Leslie Lockett. Moreover, I have benefitted from the Center for Epigraphical and Paleography Studies and its curator Ms. Wendy A. Watkins who assisted my research and granted me access to the Center’s impressive collections. I also owe my gratitude to the professors who have guided me throughout my graduate career: Professors Karen A. Winstead, Alan B. Farmer, Barbara v Hanawalt, Daniel Hobbins, Marlene Longenecker, Amanpal Garcha, Mark Conroy, Kay Halasek, and Edgar Singleton. In general, this project is a testament to the extraordinary group of faculty at the Ohio State University that encourages and supports its students. Their attentions have fostered a community of scholars to which I am eternally grateful. I would like to extend special thanks to Dr. David T. Gura for lending me his unedited notes and his insights about dissertation writing. I also must acknowledge my heartfelt gratitude to Ms. Christine Moreno, whose proofreading, discussions, and encouragement helped me to find the end of this project. In addition, I would be remiss not to address the great fortune I have had when working alongside Mr. Ryan Judkins, Ms. Elisabeth Ravert, Ms. Envera Dukaj, and Mr. Aaron Seddon for the past six years. Finally, I do not know where I would be without the assistance of the incomparable Ms. Kathleen Griffin, the coordinator of Graduate Studies who makes this process possible. vi Vita 2000................................................................Chatsworth High School, Chatsworth, California 2004................................................................B.A. English, University of California, Irvine 2007...............................................................M.A. English, The Ohio State University 2005 to present.........................................Graduate Student, Department of English, The Ohio State University Fields of Study Major Field: English vii Table of Contents Abstract..........................................................................................................................................................ii Dedication.....................................................................................................................................................iv Acknowledgements....................................................................................................................................v Vita..................................................................................................................................................................vii Chapter 1: Framing Ovid: Building Fourteenth‐ and Fifteenth‐Century Ovidian Structures........................................................................................................................................1 Chapter 2: The Labor of Sloth: Gower’s Reformulation of the Metamorphoses............82 Chapter 3: Chaucer’s Monkish Endeavor: “The Monk’s Tale” as a Codified Commentary on the Monastic Ovidian Commentary Tradition.........................135 Chapter 4: Out of the Classroom and Into the Frying Pan: Lydgate’s Literary and Clerical Blend of Ovidian Frame Narratives in Book I of The Fall of Princes.........................................................................................................................................196 Bibliography............................................................................................................................................276 viii Chapter 1: Framing Ovid: Building Fourteenth­ and Fifteenth­Century Ovidian Structures The Middle Ages appropriated Ovidian myths with the sole purpose of sanitizing and predigesting them in tidy Christian packaging. Or did it? When it comes to analyzing Ovid’s role in medieval literature, scholars have largely focused on the ways in which commentaries made the Metamorphoses palatable to a sensitive Christian audience afraid of the poet’s licentious and irrational pagan ways.1 The Metamorphoses undoubtedly posed problems for medieval Christian audiences, and moralizing commentaries irrefutably assisted its transition into medieval vernacular literature. However, the moralizing tradition represents only one dimension of the surviving medieval manifestations of the Metamorphoses. Ovid’s narratives, like the subjects they discussed, underwent several transformations. Casting them aside as individual mythic episodes allegorized to avoid the censure of ecclessiastics overlooks the complex process, over several centuries, by which Ovidian narratives were absorbed into the vernacular frame 1 See, for example, Peter Dronke, “Metamorphoses: Allegory in Medieval Commentaries on Ovid and Apuleius,” Journal of the Warburg Courtauld Institutes, 72 (2010): 21‐39; Vincent Gillespie, “The Study of Classical Authors: from the Twelfth Century to c. 1450,” The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. II, ed. Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 145‐235; Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art, trans. Barbara F. Sessions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961); and Beryl Smalley, English Friars and Antiquity in the Early Fourteenth Century (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1960). 1 narrative tradition that reached its flowering in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The last two centuries of the Middle Ages witnessed an explosion of Ovidian adaptations within frame narratives such as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Giovanni Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium, Decameron, and Genealogia deorum gentilium, Christine de Pizan’s Livre de la Cité des Dames, and John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, all of which adapt
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