The renowned scholar-poet John of Garland wrote the Integumenta Ovidii ("Allegories on Ovid") in early thirteenth-century Paris at a time of renewed interest in Classical Latin literature. In this short poem, John offers a series of dense, highly allusive allegories on various Greek and Roman myths in Ovid's Metamorphoses. The text is here edited and translated for the first time in 90 years, drawing on the evidence of over two dozen manuscripts. Comprehensive explanatory notes help readers to understand John's condensed allegories in their medieval context. Textual notes discuss the various difficulties in the transmitted text of the poem, and offer several improvements on the texts of the older editions.

This study investigates the reception of Ovid's heroines in Metamorphoses commentaries written between 1100 and 1618. The Ovidian heroine offers a telling window onto medieval and early modern clerical constructions of gender and selfhood. In the context of classical representations of the feminine, the book examines Ovid's engagement of the heroine to explore problems of intentionality. The second part of the study presents commentaries by such clerics as William of Orléans, the "Vulgate" commentator, Thomas Walsingham, and Raphael Regius, illustrating the reception of the Ovidian heroine in medieval France and England as well as in Renaissance Italy and Germany. The works analyzed here show that clerical readings of the feminine in Ovid reflect greater heterogeneity than is commonly alleged. Both moralizing summaries and Latin editions used as schooltexts are discussed.

This book explores the extraordinary influence of Ovid upon the culture - learned, literary, artistic and popular - of medieval Europe.

Chastity as a topic is an ideal interdisciplinary consideration since it accesses iconographical representation, the philosophical issues of purity, morality, and of innocence; the legal issues of loss and punishment, the historical issues of celibacy, and the legislation that topic evoked; as well as the role of chastity as a literary topos in Late Antiquity as well as the Middle Ages, for example, in medieval commentary traditions and within medieval vernacular literatures. The topic of Chastity, as well as its opposing characteristics, thus provides an arena for a discussion of the transmission of Ovid and the commentaries this author provoked in the Middle Ages, the interpretation of images illustrating legal texts, cross-cultural enquiries, such as the reciprocity between Christian, Muslim, and Judaic interpretations of temperance, continence, and abstinence, and the theological-legal issue of “God’s rights” (in excising Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden). Contributors: Nancy van Deusen; Frank T. Coulson; Marcia L. Colish; Uta-Renate Blumenthal; Thérèse-Anne Druart; Claudia Bornholdt; Susan L’Engle; Cristian Gaspar; and Rafael Chodos.

The origins of selected instances of metamorphosis in Germanic literature are traced from their roots in Ovid's Metamorphoses, grouped roughly on an 'ascending evolutionary scale' (invertebrates, birds, animals, and mermaids). Whilst a broad range of mythological, legendary, fairytale and folktale traditions have played an appreciable part, Ovid's Metamorphoses is still an important comparative analysis and reference point for nineteenth- and twentieth-century German-language narratives of transformations. Metamorphosis is most often used as an index of crisis: an existential crisis of the subject or a crisis in a society's moral, social or cultural values. Specifically selected texts for analysis include Jeremias Gotthelf's Die schwarze Spinne (1842) with the terrifying metamorphoses of Christine into a black spider, the metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa in Kafka's Die Verwandlung (1915), ambiguous metamorphoses in E. T. A. Hoffmann's Der goldne Topf (1814), Hermann Hesse's Piktors Verwandlungen (1925), Der Steppenwolf (1927) and Christoph Ransmayr's Die letzte Welt (1988). Other mythical metamorphoses are examined in texts by Bachmann, Fouqué, Fontane, Goethe, Nietzsche, Nelly Sachs, Thomas Mann and Wagner, and these and many others confirm that metamorphosis is used historically, scientifically, for religious purposes; to highlight identity, sexuality, a dream state, or for metaphoric, metonymic or allegorical reasons.