<i>Alison Keith and Stephen Rupp,</i> Metamorphosis: The Changing Face of Ovid in Medieval and Early Modern Europe<i>Metamorphosis: The Changing Face of Ovid in Medieval and Early Modern Europe</i>. Edited by Alison Keith and Stephen Rupp. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2007. Pp. 350.

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewAlison Keith and Stephen Rupp, Metamorphosis: The Changing Face of Ovid in Medieval and Early Modern Europe Metamorphosis: The Changing Face of Ovid in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Edited by Alison Keith and Stephen Rupp. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2007. Pp. 350.Warren GinsbergWarren GinsbergUniversity of Oregon Search for more articles by this author University of OregonPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAfter Daphne has turned into the laurel, Apollo takes possession of her by defining it. “You my hair, my lyre, my arrows shall always hold,” he says as he clasps the trunk.1 The tree seems to consent: it “nods [adnuit] with new-made branches, its top appeared to shake like a head” (1.567). At the same time, however, Ovid reports that even barked over, Daphne “refuses” (refugit) Apollo's kisses (1.556). The verb implies that she still flees the god. So while the laurel may say yes to his honors, the nymph who is the laurel (Greek daphne is Latin laurea) may well be saying no. Ovid, of course, is happy to support both readings; he knows that a tree swaying in the wind signifies nothing.Apollo's imposition of meaning and Daphne's possible refusal of it suggests that interpretation, like everything else in a world of metamorphosis, is in flux. Bodies changed into new forms are and are not what they were; they welcome and resist categorization through ideas such as propriety, identity, and gender. Their native fluidity also doubly challenges critics who would assess the Ovidian imitations of later poets and artists. Not only will the critics need to attend to the ways in which they have stabilized Ovid's transformations, but they will also have to account for the ways in which the adaptation stabilizes the metamorphosis it refashions.Or so it seems to me; others have argued that change permanently fixes a figure's nature. But whether we read Ovid's epic as followers of Apollo or listen for the voice of Daphne, the Metamorphoses does prompt us to reflect on our own readerly practices. From this point of view, Metamorphosis: The Changing Face of Ovid in Medieval and Early Modern Europe misses an opportunity. Despite the collected essays' individual merits, they talk to one another only obliquely. Rather than accept Ovid's implicit invitation to reformulate what we mean by source study, cross-disciplinary methodologies, and cultural translation, as a group the studies remain what they were, the acta of the conference where they were first presented as papers.The volume begins with the editors' useful survey of the literary and artistic fortuna of the Metamorphoses in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Their precis serves as prelude for the studies that follow; I only wish, to continue their metaphor, that they had also made it a recitative—an inaugural discussion, which other essays continued, about, for instance, the ways in which Ovid's poem conforms to and resists commentaries on it, or how the classical reception of Ovid interrogates the assumptions of medieval and Renaissance commentaries.More than anyone else, Frank Coulson has deepened our understanding of the differing emphases of medieval interpretation of the Metamorphoses. In his contribution, Coulson first surveys the philological, ethical, philosophical and scientific, and composite traditions that flourished in France from about 1100 to 1350. He then concentrates on four texts associated with the cathedral school at Orleans. Both the review of the archival background and the discussion of the individual manuscripts are excellent. Of particular note are Coulson's remarks on the “Vulgate” composite, “the most important Latin commentary on the Metamorphoses from the high Middle Ages” (35).One would think that moralizing allegorists especially would have flattened Ovid's polyvalency; in fact, the churchmen often unintentionally imitated his epic's ironies by commending and condemning the same figure. Marilynn Desmond convincingly demonstrates that Diana's punishment of Actaeon's innocent guilt creates a crisis of ethical interpretation for readers of the Metamorphoses. She then insightfully recasts this crisis by contrasting the explications in the Ovide moralisé (1340), which exonerate the victim and the goddess, with their accompanying illustrations, where the artist has drawn a sharp line between pagan retribution and Christian redemption of suffering by juxtaposing Actaeon's dismemberment with the Incarnation.The Ovide moralisé also figures in Suzanne Conklin Akbari's fine discussion of Christine de Pizan's transformation of herself into a man in the Mutacion de Fortune (1403). Akbari argues that, prompted by the commentary, Christine came to see metaphor as a metamorphosis that brings outward appearance into conformity with inner form. Rather than domesticating the transgressive properties of figurative language, Christine's understanding of metaphor actually questions the primacy that allegorists gave meaning over the fiction that conveys it. By becoming a man, Christine asks, “Which is the ‘real’ shape of the body, male or female?” (82).For Patricia Zalamea, Ovid's pools are sites where vision, desire, transformation, and self-reflection meet. Her study, though, focuses less on these settings than on the fountain of the Muses in Christine's Chemin de long estude (1403), where sight, love, knowledge, and change become adjuncts of poetic inspiration. The illustrations Christine commissioned, however, ignore the weight she gives vision in the production of knowledge. Zalamea's readings, which clearly complement Desmond's, are perceptive; they would have been productively troubled, I think, had she grappled with Narcissus, who haunts all accounts of knowing.Chaucerians will welcome Jaime Fumo's argument that the Metamorphoses, which subverts and reappropriates authority through storytelling, was not simply a resource the English poet mined for allusions when he created the Wife of Bath but the wellspring from which he drew the narratological principles of her prologue and tale of transformation. This is an appealing thesis. Fumo devotes most of her essay to Chaucer's reconfigurations of Argus and Midas. She has more ideas than space to unpack them; everything she says is immensely suggestive.In “Lessons for a King,” Katheryn McKinley persuasively demonstrates that John Gower instructed Richard II about the dangers of tyranny by rewriting two of Ovid's most violent tales. In the Confessio amantis (1390), Jason and Medea exemplify the importance of keeping one's word; Tereus, Procne, and Philomela underscore the depravity of a king's abuse of royal power. Thomas Willard's subject is Ovid's authority in Renaissance alchemical treatises. Readers who scoffed at the idea that the poet's metamorphoses are allegories for transforming elements, Willard argues, more or less shared the Roman Catholic desire to keep science and religion separate; those who subscribed to such readings shared the Protestant desire to harmonize them. Ovid's authority was also invoked and refuted in debates about witches in sixteenth-century English demonological writings. Cora Fox examines Reginald Scot's ambivalent opinion of Ovid in the Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584). Scot is convinced that all stories about bodily transformation are absurd; he also unquestioningly accepts Ovid's testimony about shape-shifting witches. These three essays do more than bridge the medieval and early modern England; they make visible important developments in the commentary tradition. These developments deserve their own discussion; this is one instance where I especially wish the authors had engaged each other.For Zak Gur, Petrarch's Secretum (1347–53) stages a contest between two forms of selfhood, one Ovidian, the other Augustinian. The model of the former is Narcissus, who stands for the soul frustrated in its desires and exiled from itself; the latter is a sort of corrected Narcissus, in which image and self are united. Petrarch, Zak concludes, sided with Ovid; the self he identifies with is the mirror-like reflection of himself that existed in the world. Cynthia Nazarian contrasts the ways in which Petrarch and Maurice Scève retrieved Actaeon's dismembered body. In the Rime sparse (1374), Petrarch made the transmuted hunter's scattered parts an emblem of his soul; he could counterbalance this fragmentation only by also identifying himself with Apollo, who gave the laurel the enduring fame that the Canzoniere (1374) will give Laura. In the Délie (1544), Actaeon/stag is the figure that allows Scève to reintegrate his poetic personhood by gathering the remnants of the torment, silence, and alienation he has experienced in love. Julia Perlman elucidates the battle for artistic supremacy that painters waged with poets in the Italian Renaissance by carefully analyzing Michelangelo's depiction of Cupid wounding Venus, which led her to love Adonis.For R. John McCaw, Ovid's Phaethon stands behind Don Quixote's and Sancho Panza's ride on Clavileño as well as Sancho's “transformation” from squire to governor. Sanda Munjic shows that Luis de Góngora used Ovidian birds, especially his owl and crow, to punctuate his critique in the Solitudes (1613) of sea voyages undertaken for greed. Maggie Kilgour ably knits up the volume with her perspicacious reading of Milton's reformation of transformation in Paradise Lost (1667). For Milton, the fall was a “metamorphosis of the nature of change that inhibits real change” (271). With Ovid's help, he was able to envisage the kind of change still possible, one that ended in neither endless flux nor static permanence.Summaries as bald as these cannot convey the subtlety of some of these essays' arguments. All of them are worth reading. Still, had the contributors, in transforming their papers into articles, been asked to speak beyond their subjects, to examine the overlap and divergence of their methods and conclusions, this volume would have entered into Ovid's spirit of change even more than it does. Notes 1. Ovid, Metamorphoses, bks. 1–8, trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library, 3rd. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 1.558–59, my translation. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 108, Number 4May 2011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/659834 Views: 20Total views on this site © 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected] Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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