Of all the classical auctores who were celebrated, circulated and emulated in the Middle Ages, none experienced so heady a mix of fame and infamy as Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso, 43 bc–ad 17/18), the Augustan poet principally known for his Metamorphoses, amatory works and poems written while in exile. The designation of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as the aetas Ovidiana by Ludwig Traube has lingered in the scholarly imagination in a way that his parallel appointments of the aetas Vergiliana and the aetas Horatiana have not; and this ‘age of Ovid’ has swelled beyond its original chronological and technical boundaries to encompass the flourishing of Ovid and Ovidiana in multiple forms, extending far beyond the two centuries appointed by Traube.Footnote ¹ Of the various and intertwined strands which comprise the medieval reception of Ovid, this book explores medieval responses to Ovidian exile, focusing on twelfth- to fifteenth-century scholastic and literary responses in England (broadly speaking, both chronologically and geographically). By ‘Ovidian exile’ I mean two things: the poetry written by Ovid in exile (primarily the Tristia, Epistulae ex Ponto and Ibis) and Ovid himself as the figure of the exiled poet, who is irrevocably embedded into the exilic works. Medieval responses to Ovid’s exile are varied and creative, ranging from responses formed in the medieval schoolroom, to the impulse to Christianise the pagan poet via his exile, to the poets of the late fourteenth century who become the Ovidian exile in their own poetry. Examining a cross-section of these diverse responses demonstrates the prominence and importance of Ovid and his exile across various medieval contexts, and I seek to bring his exile to the centre of Ovidian reception studies, alongside the mythographer-Ovid and the lover-Ovid about whom we are used to reading.Footnote ²

What is it about Ovidian exile in particular which speaks to the later Middle Ages, and which prompted a proliferation of responses? Across the responses that this book explores, I highlight several important aspects of the exile poetry which other works by Ovid, and works by other classical authorities, could not offer. The exile poetry has particular character as a collection of letters from and about exile, with musings on abandonment, lament, desire and so on, which medieval respondents used to express these same woes (whether individual marginalisation or external affairs, such as contemptus mundi-style laments on vice in the world). Ovid’s model of exile is so effective in its affect that often it was preferred to the models of other famous exiles (most notably Cicero, Boethius or exiles in Christian Scripture).Footnote ³ The epistolary form in itself prompted responses in the absence of any known or extant letters back to Ovid from Rome, speaking to the later medieval penchant for the ars dictaminis and the dialogue form. Secondly, the tone of the exile poetry (nominally contrite and repentant, although as I discuss in Chapter 1, also full of Ovidian play and irony) enabled one of the most fundamental shifts in Ovidian reception throughout its long history: the edification and Christianisation of an immoral, salacious poet, in which the exile poetry transforms into spiritual, penitent works from a poet who was exiled for writing erotodidactic filth. This medieval paradigm builds on a penitential arc which Ovid himself had suggested in his pleas to be recalled from exile, which justified engaging with not just the exile poetry but all of Ovid’s poetic corpus. A crucial connection was formed, therefore, between the exilic Ovid and the various other ‘Ovids’ of the Middle Ages (such as the mythographer-Ovid, the lover-Ovid, and several other Ovids, all of whom I discuss later in this introductory chapter). This connection between the pre- and post-exilic Ovid respected the functions which only the exile poetry could perform at the same time as rendering it inextricable from the whole.

Thirdly, later medieval respondents also focused on the special and intense relationship between the two aspects of Ovid’s exile, the exiled poet and his exilic poetry: it is through the exile poetry that Ovid cultivates how he intends to be remembered in his Nachleben, and in the exilic works Ovid is intensely focused on how to be a poet. Some medieval responses test this bond, while others embrace it; and late medieval poets, similarly prioritising the questions of how to articulate their poetic selves and poetic afterlives, as well as their interest in writing from real or poeticised margins, turn to Ovidian exile to answer these questions. In this respect, I focus on fourteenth-century English poets who were especially interested in inhabiting Ovidian exile in some way. And finally, there is the sheer Ovidianness of responses to Ovid’s exile. I begin this book by arguing in Chapter 1 that Ovid creates a model of response in his exile poetry, one which simultaneously centres Ovid as an ultimate authority while also embedding a licence to creatively exploit the ambiguities surrounding Ovid’s exile. The medieval responses which follow in the remaining chapters take up this model, following Ovid’s conception of how he might be remembered, even in the wild speculations and Christian conversions which abounded. This proactiveness of Ovid, and the receptiveness of medieval readers to Ovid’s directions, make for a genuinely interactive form of reception, and on a broader scale this book intends to argue strongly for a highly dynamic theory of classical reception (in conjunction with current notions of active readership and response theory).Footnote ⁴

This book proposes, in short, that Ovid’s exile was well known in the later Middle Ages, and that it had a widespread and powerful effect on medieval scholastic and literary thought. While the exilic Ovid was insuperably connected to the wider understanding of Ovid in the Middle Ages (often in messy and multitudinous ways), it was a discrete and distinct type of Ovid who could be alternately distanced from and connected back to other manifestations of Ovid. Ultimately, Ovidian exile informed teaching, preaching, reading and writing – among a host of activities I term ‘responses’ – in the later Middle Ages, offering a mode of voicing exile, marginalisation and poethood itself.

Ovid and His Exile

In ad 8, at the age of fifty, Ovid was relegated to Tomis in the Black Sea, a town at the outermost limits of the Roman Empire.Footnote ⁵ Although largely referred to as an exile (including by Ovid himself), he was technically relegated, meaning that he was physically banished from Rome but retained Roman citizenship.Footnote ⁶ His crime, famously, was twofold: ‘a poem and a mistake’ (carmen et error, Tr. 2.207), according to Ovid himself.Footnote ⁷ The carmen is agreed to be the Ars amatoria, a premise corroborated both by the content of the Ars and by the fact that Ovid says as much throughout the exile poetry.Footnote ⁸ The Ars’ teachings of immorality and infidelity likely incurred the wrath of Augustus, who had elsewhere been enacting increasingly stricter laws on morality in the years leading up to Ovid’s exile. Augustus had already exiled his daughter and granddaughter, both on the grounds of adultery.Footnote ⁹ The error is less certain – but perhaps no less salacious – than the carmen, and it is made all the more mysterious by Ovid’s equivocations on the topic.Footnote ¹⁰ His most explicit reference to any mistake appears in Tristia 2, where he bewails:

There is enough here to indicate that the reader should not necessarily take these lines as unaltered historical fact, with its overwrought rhetorical devices and the grandeur of a mythological comparison. Whatever Ovid saw, whatever crime or mistake he committed, he was relegated, and despite penning his exile poetry and begging for an imperial pardon, he remained there until his death in ad 17 or 18. The succession of Tiberius upon Augustus’ death in ad 14 was not enough to recall him, and there is no evidence that Ovid ever returned to Rome.Footnote ¹²

The only contemporary witnesses to Ovid’s exile are the poems which he wrote while in Tomis, namely the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto (collections of letters from Ovid in exile in five and four books, respectively) and the Ibis (a curse-poem addressed to an enemy).Footnote ¹³ Several points here form an overview of the aspects which are particularly relevant to medieval responses to Ovid in exile: their epistolary form and central concerns; Ovid’s contradictions and ambiguities, as well as the question of the truth of the poetry and Ovidian sincerity; how the exile poetry relates to the genre of autobiography; and the exile poetry’s links with his pre-exilic works, especially the Heroides.

The Tristia and ex Ponto are both collections of letters in verse, each epistle a sermo absentis which emphasises Ovid’s distance from his homeland, friends and family. Their epistolary form is important, and medieval writings on the ars dictaminis also highlight the absence embedded in letters: John of Salisbury, for instance, writes in the twelfth century that letters ‘communicate, without emitting a sound, the utterances of those who are absent’.Footnote ¹⁴ Ovid’s two collections of letters are formally, stylistically and thematically extremely similar.Footnote ¹⁵ Ovid himself remarks in the first poem of ex Ponto, addressed to Brutus, that:

In the ex Ponto, the addressees of each letter are named, while in the Tristia they are not. The ultimate addressee behind all of these letters is the emperor Augustus, who alone can grant Ovid reprieve from his exile.Footnote ¹⁷ Ovid often asks the recipients of his poetry to petition Augustus on his behalf (for instance, with detailed instructions at Pont. 1.2.101–50), while at other times he dispenses with an intermediary and addresses the emperor directly (as at Tr. 2.27, where he addresses ‘merciful Caesar’, mitissime Caesar).Footnote ¹⁸ One medieval accessus to the Tristia summarises that ‘the title [Tristia] was given to the work for the reason that its author was living in sadness’ (huic operi titulus a causa inponitur, eo quod eius auctor in tristicia versabatur).Footnote ¹⁹

The Tristia and ex Ponto focus largely on Ovid’s plight in exile, from the perilous journey taken to reach Tomis (described throughout Tristia 1) to Ovid’s various hardships, including the cold weather, the barren land, his barbaric neighbours, the decline of his proficiency in Latin and so on.Footnote ²⁰ These adversities suffered by Ovid and his loathing of Tomis are often compared with the Rome which Ovid misses – so Ovid asks, ‘What is better than Rome? What worse than the cold of Scythia?’ (quid melius Roma? Scythico quid frigore peius?, Pont. 1.3.37), two questions which might be said to encapsulate the exile poetry. Recurring topics throughout are Ovid’s pleas for imperial clemency, the act of writing in exile, his exile as a living death and reflections on his past.Footnote ²¹ He frequently appeals to posterity, and for the positive and eternal reception of his works, a feature particularly important for later medieval poets articulating their own desires for literary immortality.Footnote ²²

The tone of the exile poetry is difficult to pin down, not least because Ovid actively encourages contradictions, ambiguities and ironies in his works. Is he, for example, the suppliant Roman citizen, deferential before Augustus’ wrath, power and mercy?Footnote ²³ Or is he the masterful praeceptor, authoritative and proud of his poetry, masking this pride with empty humility? At the end of Tristia 3.7, Ovid boldly declares that Augustus has no power over his genius (Tr. 3.7.47–48), but at the beginning of the very next letter, Ovid encourages himself to worship Augustus, who is divine and powerful (Tr. 3.8.13–14). In Tristia 2, Ovid is further put in a position which continually threatens to contradict itself, in his extended case for his return to Rome. He defends his amatory poetry but must defer to Augustus’ choice to exile him; he therefore only criticises the grounds for his exile, not the authority of the emperor.Footnote ²⁴ These contradictions are partly due to the competing functions and audiences of the exile poetry. On the one hand, Ovid must attend to his current situation, addressing his friends and the emperor in an effort to ensure his recall from exile: in this sense, he must be politically sensitive and subservient. On the other hand, he is intent on establishing his poetic immortality and moulding his future reception, requiring a direct address to posterity (‘listen, posterity’, accipe posteritas, Tr. 4.10.2) and an emphasis on the quality of his work.

Two questions related to the shifting tone of the exile poetry emerge here, often debated and particularly relevant to this book: how sincere is Ovid in the exilic works? And how true is the exile poetry? Edward Kennard Rand memorably claimed that ‘There is genuine grief and repentance beneath the badinage’ in the exile poems, although scholarship has since found such trust in reading clear authorial feelings and intentions behind a literary work rather unfashionable.Footnote ²⁵ Many of Ovid’s complaints, lamentations and even his references to geographical locations are deeply conventional, as are his appeals to posterity.Footnote ²⁶ But this conventionality does not have to negate possible sincerity. The notion that only originality can engender sincerity is a more modern idea than any found in ancient or medieval literature, and conventional does not necessarily mean impersonal or negating the autobiographical.Footnote ²⁷ For instance, in medieval literature – and I am thinking especially here of medieval lyric poetry – we find that artifice can represent a type of sincerity, and even further, that convention might better articulate sincerity than originality.Footnote ²⁸ Ovid’s exile poetry might not represent Ovid’s personal sincerity, but it ‘creates the effect of sincerity intertextually’, as Paul Allen Miller has perceptively argued.Footnote ²⁹ Mary H. T. Davisson has also argued that the very use of convention in Ovid’s exile poetry serves to underscore the uniqueness of Ovid’s situation.Footnote ³⁰ Ovid himself implicitly poses the question of whether the sincerity he articulates is a poetic or personal type of authenticity, as much as those categories can be distinguished: he simultaneously suggests and displaces the connection between the emotions expressed in the exile poetry and the historical individual. The second part of this book in particular explores how medieval poets approached and absorbed Ovid’s capacity for linking, but never conclusively defining, the poetic and the personal. With respect to the question of Ovidian sincerity, medieval poets (especially Geoffrey Chaucer) seem less concerned with whether Ovid ‘actually meant it’ and more invested in the practice of producing an evasive authorial presence. The ambiguity of Ovidian sincerity is appealing in itself.

On the truth of Ovid’s exile, we arrive at the question of the exile poetry as ‘autobiography’. Ovid as a real poet and his poetic persona clearly blur in his exile poetry: in Chapter 3, I discuss Ovid’s insistent linking of his life and work and medieval responses to this connection. His mode of life-writing, however, does not fit with modern terminologies of selfhood. ‘Autobiography’ does not fit, a modern term which carries connotations of some form of truth, or at least an awareness from the author that the truth matters.Footnote ³¹ We could attempt to find moments of verifiable truth in the exile poems. For example: if we accept that Ovid was in fact relegated to Tomis, then there will be some genuine aspects to the poems. He must have made a journey to Tomis, as he relates in the Tristia; but was there a storm? How fierce? And which route did he take?Footnote ³² Asking these questions is no longer particularly fashionable: it is clearly not Ovid’s intention to relate a factual account of his exile, nor is he bound by a modern binary between truth and fiction.Footnote ³³ The point is neatly articulated by P. A. Rosenmeyer, who argues that ‘truth and fiction … function less as polar opposites and more as points on a continuum’ in the exile poetry.Footnote ³⁴ The more neutral (albeit more vague, and less emphatic) terms ‘life-writing’ and ‘self-writing’ have since come into vogue as a way of describing how ancient and medieval authors thought about the versions of their selves in their work.Footnote ³⁵

Of the ways in which we could write about writing the premodern self, Nora Goldschmidt’s work on ‘biofiction’ is most applicable to Ovid, not least because much of her work is tested against him and his poetry.Footnote ³⁶ Roman poets, Goldschmidt argues, established a mode of writing in which they ‘inscribed their own self-consciously constructed life narratives into their works’, thus demanding that their works be read in terms of their life.Footnote ³⁷ The concept is particularly fruitful for a medieval reading of Ovid’s exile poetry since they did read classical works in terms of their authors’ lives, in the accessus which preceded ancient texts and in the genre of the vita auctoris, both of which are examined in Chapter 2. In Chapter 1, I explore how Ovid wrote about himself and his experience, modes of sincerity and literary tradition, the exile poetry’s relation to truth and its particular voice. Part II of this book is concerned with how medieval poets revoiced such a complex personal voice, especially within the medieval constructs of authority and experience.

While Ovid’s exile poetry is deeply connected to the entirety of his poetic corpus (to the Ars as a palinode, to the Metamorphoses and Fasti through his textual revisions, and so on), the poems from exile are most linked to his Heroides, Ovid’s collection of letters written as though by famous female figures who have been abandoned by their male lover (in Her. 1–15), and in the ‘double letters’ (Her. 16–21), paired letters between male abandoner and the woman abandoned. The connections between the exile poetry and the Heroides were particularly important for medieval respondents and are therefore deserving of mention here. For starters, the ‘double letters’ were likely written in exile, immediately blurring the boundaries of what we term the ‘pre’ and ‘post’ exilic poetry, since the Heroides are usually considered with the pre-exilic corpus.Footnote ³⁸ More importantly, however, the Heroides are epistolary, formally connecting them to the Tristia and ex Ponto; and in the exile poetry, Ovid consciously casts himself in the mould of an abandoned Heroidean woman, particularly from the single letters.Footnote ³⁹ While he makes frequent comparisons between himself and other historical and mythological figures (especially Ulysses), the more fundamental comparison is in Ovid adopting personae, tone and forms of expression from the Heroides.Footnote ⁴⁰ Across the Heroides, the female narrators weep as they write – Briseis, for instance, opens her letter to Achilles with ‘whatever blots you shall see, her tears have made’ (quascumque adspicies, lacrimae fecere lituras, Her. 3.3).Footnote ⁴¹ The similarities with the opening of the Tristia are clear, as Ovid encourages his book: ‘do not be ashamed of blots; he who sees them will feel that they were caused by my tears’ (neve liturarum pudeat; qui viderit illas, | de lacrimis factas sentiet esse meis, Tr. 1.1.13–14), and as in the Heroides, the theme recurs throughout both poetry collections from exile, typically at the beginning of each letter.Footnote ⁴² Many of the overlapping aspects from the Heroides to the exilic works, like the ‘weeping as I write’ convention, intersect with Ovid’s authorial presence in the exile poetry. When medieval authors then came to revoice Ovid, they were therefore confronted with a voice which was already actively revoicing itself, and the embedded connections between Ovid’s pre- and post-exilic poetry meant that Ovid’s exile poetry had to be considered a fundamental aspect of Ovid in the Middle Ages.

Ovid’s self-modelling as a female figure from his previous poetry – and mythologising himself in the same moment – is complex, with various implications for the medieval responses it engendered. In Chapter 5, I examine how John Gower inhabits Ovidian exile, including those aspects which derive from the Heroides. In Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, which I discuss in Chapter 6, the central figure of Criseyde is ultimately derived from Briseis in Heroides 3 – and yet it is Troilus who inhabits an Ovidian mode, lamenting and weeping after Criseyde’s abandonment. The Prologue to The Legend of Good Women takes its cues from Ovid’s exile poetry, I argue, while the tales comprising the Legend are directly adapted from the Heroides (with the epistolary form removed): the Legend as a whole, therefore, demonstrates Chaucer’s sophisticated understanding of the relationship between the exile poetry and the Heroides. Overall, while Ovid’s intertextual allusions in the exile poetry all filter through to the Middle Ages in some way, it is the links to the Heroides which are most fundamentally felt in later Middle English poetry.

I have not yet mentioned the Ibis, which of Ovid’s exile poetry is altogether different, in style a stand-alone Callimachean curse-poem attacking a single, unnamed enemy. The title refers to the Egyptian bird – one medieval accessus calls the ibis ‘a most foul bird’ (avis sordidissima), where the common interpretation of the ibis as an unhygienic animal reflects the curse-poem’s distaste for its subject.Footnote ⁴³ In the Ibis, Ovid hurls invective after invective against his enemy in a poetic onslaught, expressed by way of complex and abstruse allusions to mythological figures and events (the Callimachean style of ambiguity or convolutions, ambages, Ib. 59). The tone of the poem is therefore notably different from the Tristia and ex Ponto, although there are thematic overlaps in their focus on wrongs committed against Ovid, as well as a certain playfulness in the Ibis’ insistence on the reader solving the poem’s puzzles.Footnote ⁴⁴ The Tristia, ex Ponto and Ibis are linked by the fact that they were all written in exile, and on at least one occasion in the Middle Ages they are confused. In one early fourteenth-century manuscript, the title ‘the first book of Ovid’s Ibis’ (liber primus Ouidii in imbiim) appears above the Tristia rather than the Ibis.Footnote ⁴⁵ Of all Ovid’s exile poetry, the Ibis has been least discussed in relation to its medieval responses, despite the abundant and rigorous late antique and medieval scholia which it attracted.Footnote ⁴⁶ Although I consider all three poems Ovid’s ‘exile poetry’ and demonstrate that they all impacted the medieval reception of Ovid, in this study I generally treat the Ibis separately.Footnote ⁴⁷

These three texts are the primary corpus of what we call Ovid’s ‘exile poetry’. Scholarly attitudes to the exile poetry have changed dramatically, in both classical and medieval literary studies. Historically, the exile poetry suffered the labels of repetitiveness and tediousness.Footnote ⁴⁸ Like the medieval responses which I discuss in this book, these attitudes can be traced back to Ovid himself. Pre-empting his readers’ complaints, he declares: ‘“but”, [you say], “they [the poems] are poor stuff”. I admit it’ (‘at mala sunt’. fateor, Tr. 5.1.69), although he implies that this is due to unworkable conditions (‘they are not more barbarous than the place of their origin’, non sunt illa suo barbariora loco, Tr. 5.1.72).Footnote ⁴⁹ ‘It has been common practice’, R. J. Dickinson summarised in 1973, ‘to regard the Tristia as poor stuff, the long melancholy complaint of a poet whose vitality had flagged when he was exiled, but whose capacity for self-pity had grown proportionately’.Footnote ⁵⁰ This can no longer be said to be the case, and Ovid in exile has benefited from the continued interest in Ovidian poetry, the emergence of reception studies and the interest in the medieval perception of the classics over the last fifty years, meaning that the exile poetry is treated as complex and worthy of study, if still underrepresented in studies of Ovid and the Middle Ages.Footnote ⁵¹

Which Ovid? An Overview of Ovid(s) in the Middle Ages

Throughout late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, Ovid remained known, if not widely read and transmitted.Footnote ⁵² The ascension of his star began in earnest from the twelfth century onwards, and by the fifteenth century, his texts and life staked an enormous claim to the Western medieval imagination. Alongside increased production of Ovid’s works, a vast body of Ovidiana was created and circulated: commentaries, accessus, Lives, moralisations and pseudo-Ovids, all of which came to influence how Ovid and his poetry were perceived, and which shaped the medieval responses I explore in this book. Here, I outline the various types of Ovid that a medieval audience would expect to encounter in the later Middle Ages, as well as the complexity of the medieval Ovidian tradition. While Ovidian exile forms just one part of this tradition, it is intrinsically linked to the wider understanding of Ovid in the Middle Ages, and responses to his exile often combine, collaborate or compete with references to other aspects of medieval Ovidiana.

The increasing interest in Ovid in the twelfth century coincided with, and was propelled by, the ‘twelfth-century renaissance’.Footnote ⁵³ During this time, both in England and on the continent (with significant literary and intellectual networks between the two), there was a significant increase in the production of manuscripts, centres of learning emerged, universities developed and new forms of disseminating and interpreting knowledge evolved. Accessus, florilegia, commentaries and omnibus editions grew in popularity, fragmenting and altering the dynamic between text and respondent (as I explore in Chapter 2). Along with an upsurge in interest in Ovid and classical Latin writers, new translations of Greek and Arabic texts into Latin became available, including Aristotle, Avicenna and Maimonides, all of whom came to dramatically change intellectual thought and culture in the Western Middle Ages.

In this context, the growing interest in Ovid from the twelfth century onwards might be seen as a feature of the general intellectual changes and increasing engagement with the classics in an expanding variety of forms. And yet Ovid was in many ways the centre of the literary scene of the European twelfth century, or as Jeffrey M. Hunt, R. Alden Smith and Fabio Stok argue, ‘Literary culture in the late medieval period was … characterized by a desire for the works of Ovid’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Kathryn L. McKinley has demonstrated the proliferation of Ovidian manuscripts in England between ad 1100 and ad 1500, often with as many manuscripts of the exile poetry in circulation as the amatory poetry.Footnote ⁵⁵ As well as the increase in individual manuscripts of Ovidian works, Ovidian anthologies began to be formed. The great collection of accessus found in Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 19475 (saec. XII, Tegernsee) contains more Ovidian accessus than those of any other authority included in the anthology, with ten different accessus to the seven major elegiac works of Ovid.Footnote ⁵⁶ Munich Clm 19475 is the earliest extant anthology of accessus of its kind, and subsequently it became common to anthologise Ovidian accessus.Footnote ⁵⁷ Excerpts from across Ovid’s poetry are found in the popular form of the florilegium, especially in the Florilegium Angelicum and Florilegium Gallicum, and omnibus editions of Ovid’s poetry became popular by the end of the twelfth century.Footnote ⁵⁸ From the twelfth century onwards, in short, Ovid was in high demand, from the pulpit to the schoolroom, and was circulated in several forms.

As well as these formal differences in encountering Ovid in the Middle Ages, there is also the question: which type of Ovid?Footnote ⁵⁹ Typically, Ovid has been divided into three parts: the mythographer, the lover and the exile. These boundaries, however, were extremely porous, and moreover there are other types of Ovid which do not fit in any of these three categories. Ralph Hexter, who wrote on Ovid as the tripartite ‘exile, mythographer, lover’, later commented that he ‘somewhat arbitrarily constructed a triple focus … Perhaps the best that can be said about this strategy is its very arbitrariness.’Footnote ⁶⁰ It is not possible or even particularly desirable to disentangle one ‘Ovid’ from the other, and it is my intention here to demonstrate that the exilic poetry is an important connecting link between the various types of Ovid found throughout the Middle Ages.Footnote ⁶¹

Of the three types of Ovid enumerated here, the mythographer is the author of the Metamorphoses, commonly referred to as Ovidius maior or Ovidius magnus in the Middle Ages for its total pre-eminence in the medieval construction of the classics.Footnote ⁶² While this book is about the exiled Ovid, it must be noted that the Metamorphoses eclipses Ovid’s other poetry in terms of transmission and related Ovidiana (in particular, its commentaries and moralisations).Footnote ⁶³ This aspect of Ovid – learned, encyclopaedic, edifying – was particularly useful in the schoolroom, in the world of glossing, commenting and learning about classical civilisation and mythography.Footnote ⁶⁴ The lover-Ovid is the praeceptor amoris (or magister amoris) of the Ars and Amores especially, the salacious, harmful, infamous erotodidact who inspired so much ire in the Middle Ages.Footnote ⁶⁵ And there is the Ovid of exile, the subject of the present study, often framed as repentant (and, as such, the Remedia amoris is sometimes grouped with the exile poetry) and as a model for writing both sorrow and the self.

Other Ovids still abounded in the later medieval period, eschewing this tripartite structure. There are allegorised and moralised Ovids, which (as Jamie C. Fumo accuses of Pierre Bersuire’s Ovidius moralizatus) ‘[stretch] Ovid in moralistic directions he has no business going’, also putting pressure on the category of the ‘mythographer’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Ovidius philosophus, the philosopher Ovid, is related to the mythographer but is also a distinct entity, and Paule Demats has further divided this version of Ovid into three smaller parts (the ethical, the philosophical and the theological).Footnote ⁶⁷ The Middle Ages further saw an explosion of pseudo-Ovidiana, ranging from imitations of Ovid to full-blown forgeries.Footnote ⁶⁸ Pseudo-Ovids are woven into the genuine Ovidian canon in medieval catalogues and omnibus editions of Ovid which incorporate these texts, and the tendency of the pseudonymous works to cite genuine Ovid further complicates our understanding of who Ovid is, and what he represents, in the period.Footnote ⁶⁹

Ovid in exile, and his exile poetry, is another strand of the medieval Ovid, and a particularly important one since it helped to reconcile the different strands of his career throughout the Middle Ages. With the exile poetry, medieval respondents were able to arrange an Ovid coherent in himself and cohering with a medieval Christian approach (the latter of which enabled medieval audiences to read even the most immoral Ovidian poetry as edifying). Ovid is, after all, the author of provocative verses which offended Roman women (according to medieval accessus) and caused his exile – enough cause for him to be struck off medieval reading lists, as he was at the University of Oxford in the fourteenth century.Footnote ⁷⁰ But, crucially, the fact of his exile means that he was punished for these crimes during his lifetime, and the exile poetry is a testament to the suffering Ovid experienced (or reports that he experienced) in Tomis. I argue in this book, particularly in Chapter 3, that this life narrative creates a powerful penitential arc which enabled medieval respondents to assimilate Ovid into a contemporary Christian framework and to connect the different versions of Ovid. His exile, and his exile poetry, is a necessary aspect of the entire Ovid which completes the life of the author and could even justify the use of his poetry. The exile poetry, then, was placed in the ‘good’ category of Ovid’s works, but it also intrinsically links the good and the bad, since the ‘good’ (the exile poetry) could only emerge as a result of the ‘bad’ (the amatory poetry which forced his relegation).

The question of ‘which Ovid?’ is complicated by the complexity, vastness and non-linearity of the medieval Ovidian tradition, making it impossible to concretely disentangle one Ovid from the other. At its root this is encouraged by Ovid himself, a profoundly intertextual poet who often referred to and revised his other works, fond of redefining one poem in another one, and with a propensity for listing his other works in his poems.Footnote ⁷¹ Perhaps given licence by this invitation to plurality of interpretation, the later Middle Ages saw such a boom in Ovid and related Ovidiana that these texts became reflexive, authenticating Ovidian texts even as Ovid remained the ultimate auctor of the medieval works. Manuscripts of Ovid were cumulatively glossed over the centuries, adding multiple layers to Ovidian exegesis; moralised rewritings became the immediate sources for poets such as Chaucer and Gower; and accessus read before the text shaped how Ovid’s poetry would be interpreted.Footnote ⁷² In particular, commentaries and allegories indelibly altered how Ovid’s poetry was read. Parts of John of Garland’s Integumenta Ovidii found their way into ‘virtually every glossed manuscript of the [Metamorphoses] during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries’, according to Frank T. Coulson.Footnote ⁷³ The idea of ‘Ovid’ was necessarily shaped by what a medieval audience wanted Ovid to be as much as what he actually presented in his writing. This reflexivity is best articulated by Christopher Baswell in his study of Virgil in medieval England:

In the same way, these multiple versions of Ovid (both in the sense of the mythographer, lover, exile paradigm and in the differing forms of Ovid) came to influence each other and Ovid himself. ‘Which Ovid?’ can easily be answered in this book as ‘the exilic Ovid’, but the question itself encourages a fragmentation which medieval respondents may have attempted – as numerous examples in this book show – but which was not wholly possible.

Ovid’s Ethical Credentials

In almost every accessus to Ovid of the Middle Ages, the question will be asked: under which branch of learning is the work placed (cui parti philosophiae subponitur)? Invariably, the answer will be that the work belongs to ethics (ethicae subponitur), as was the answer for several classical works.Footnote ⁷⁵ But how could Ovid’s work, especially the Ars and Amores, be considered ethical, or otherwise relate to ethics? No other classical poet, with the exception of perhaps Horace, posed such a threat to the conventional justification of ancients work as ethical in the later Middle Ages.Footnote ⁷⁶ Ovid’s paganism and his erotic poetry – his unchristian life and immoral works – were distinctly at odds with medieval Christian teachings, and his works were criticised and even banned on these grounds; and yet medieval audiences read Ovid, medieval teachers taught using Ovid and medieval poets thought via Ovid. Over and over again, we see respondents striking a fine balance between condemning Ovid and the continued justification of engaging with him (while covertly, it seems, enjoying the very texts they denounced).Footnote ⁷⁷ The edification of Ovid is in part made possible by his exile, since the exile poems were considered moral and the very fact of his relegation demonstrated punishment and the possibility of redemption. We often find the classification of Ovid as ethical stated explicitly in scholastic texts, but the impact of the moral habilitation of Ovid and his poetry is seen – and challenged – in poetry, too, as we find in Christine de Pizan’s responses to Ovid.Footnote ⁷⁸

Ovid’s poetry was overwhelmingly co-opted as both edifying and ethical in the intellectual tradition. As Fumo summarises:

So Ovid’s poetry became assimilated into an ethical, moral tradition and was even included in ‘ethical reading lists’, as in Hugh of Trimberg’s Registrum multorum auctorum (ad 1280).Footnote ⁸⁰ Perhaps more surprising is his incorporation into later medieval sermons: Siegfried Wenzel has demonstrated the firm presence of Ovid in late medieval preaching, most often in references to the Metamorphoses but also from the exile poetry and the pseudo-Ovidian De vetula.Footnote ⁸¹

This moral recalibration saw Ovid reconstituted either as straightforwardly moral or as an example of what not to do. His intention (intentio) in the Ars, according to one medieval accessus, is ‘to teach young men about love, and how they ought to conduct themselves in love affairs with girls’ (intentio sua est in hoc opere iuvenes ad amorem instruere, quo modo debeant se in amore habere circa ipsas puellas).Footnote ⁸² The work, in the same accessus, is ‘placed under ethics, because it tells us about girls’ characters’ (ethicae subponitur, quia de moribus puellarum loquitur).Footnote ⁸³ Elsewhere, the Heroides became a handbook of virtues and vices via accessus which identify the different types of love that Ovid demonstrates through his female speakers (‘the legitimate, the illicit and the foolish, the legitimate through Penelope, the illicit through Canace, the foolish through Phyllis’, de legitimo, de illicito et stulto, de legitimo per Penolopen, de illicito per Canacen, de stulto per Phillidem).Footnote ⁸⁴ When this mode of reasoning became too strained under the pressure of the actual content of Ovid’s poetry, Ovid is justified as a negative example. The Remedia amoris teaches men and women, in this formulation, ‘how they should arm themselves against illicit love’ (qualiter contra illicitum amorem se armare debeant), and the techniques Ovid describes are therefore not to be followed.Footnote ⁸⁵

Moralised Ovids and allegorical interpretations also realigned Ovid with medieval ethics, particularly in their transformations of the Metamorphoses. The anonymous Ovide moralisé (c. 1320) and Pierre Bersuire’s Ovidius moralizatus (c. 1340) both rewrite the Metamorphoses to morally explicit ends, rehabilitating the often ambivalent versions found in Ovid.Footnote ⁸⁶ These works are multiple times the length of their source text and are examples of the phenomenon of medieval reworkings competing with Ovid’s poetry for authority: in the monasteries, James G. Clark demonstrates, the Ovidius moralizatus ‘was regarded by some readers as a substitute for the text of the Metamorphoses itself’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Just as there were multiple Ovids, ‘There were multiple Ovides moralisés’, in the assessment of Hexter.Footnote ⁸⁸ The allegorising of John of Garland’s Integumenta Ovidii and Arnulf of Orléans’ commentaries on the Metamorphoses similarly brought Ovid into the ethical sphere, providing medieval respondents with an apparatus with which they were able to justify near enough anything that Ovid had written.Footnote ⁸⁹

Did these ethical interpretations work, and was Ovid actually seen as edifying? Ovidian accessus treat his subordination to ethics as a given, but the question of Ovid’s propriety to the Christian Middle Ages was often debated. The fourteenth-century English friar John Ridevall denounces Ovid as a tempter (‘many poets have made many poems tempting men to carnal pleasures, such as the poet Ovid’, multi poete fecerunt multas poeses inducentes homines ad delectationes carnales, sicut poeta Ovidius).Footnote ⁹⁰ And the Antiovidianus provides perhaps the most strident opposition to Ovid, objecting to all of his works.Footnote ⁹¹

Other considerations of Ovid’s ethical credentials are presented as a debate, in which the various works by Ovid are either celebrated or condemned. In his Dialogus super auctores, Conrad of Hirsau (c. ad 1070–c. 1150) encourages reading the more ‘serious’ works but emphatically rejects the amatory poems:

The ex Ponto is singled out as edifying alongside the Fasti and the pseudo-Ovidian Nux; Ovid’s erotic poetry is decisively not even named. Similar views are expressed by Alexander Neckham in the twelfth century, in his reading list for students: here, the Metamorphoses and elegies of Ovid (the latter is perhaps the ex Ponto or the Heroides) are welcomed but the amatory poetry is rejected (and, contrary to Conrad of Hirsau, the Fasti is also discouraged).Footnote ⁹³

Even in the most fervent anti-Ovidian declarations, as these examples show, the exilic works are consistently approved as texts which conform to Christian ethics and morals. They did not require intense adaptation, as with the moralised and allegorised versions of Ovid, to be considered acceptable for use, and accessus are content to assign the exile poetry as pertaining to ethics for the brief reason that they deal with morals (quia in unaquaque epistola agit de moribus for the ex Ponto, or quia de moribus tractat for the Tristia).Footnote ⁹⁴ The point of debate is often whether the morality of the exile poetry – and the punishment which Ovid receives by being exiled – is enough to justify the use of Ovid’s other poetry. For commentators in the mould of Conrad of Hirsau, the exile poetry is not enough to rehabilitate Ovid ‘croaking about love’ in other poems, and the love poetry continued to be fiercely denounced across medieval texts, even as they were still read and used.

Despite this, the fact of Ovid’s exile did mean that Ovid’s life (and so, the texts which he wrote during his lifetime) could be mapped onto Christian paradigms of redemption, and the exile poetry is enough to redeem Ovid as an interconnected whole. The concept of Ovid being exiled for his crimes is amenable to the Christian notions of peregrinatio and exile, and even influenced these ideas: Hexter has observed that Hugh of St Victor invokes a distant echo of the ex Ponto to illustrate man’s exile from the ‘true homeland (patria) in heaven’.Footnote ⁹⁵ It seems remarkable for Ovid to lend authority to Christian matters – and yet other such crossovers are extant from the Middle Ages, mostly involving Ovid’s conversion to Christianity. In one memorable anecdote which forms part of Chapter 3, Ovid meets John of Patmos and becomes Sanctus Naso. Ovid’s exilic work was co-opted for Christian use just as his exilic life was transformed into a narrative ending with Christian salvation. Through Ovid’s exile, the Christianisation of a pagan poet was facilitated in a way that was not possible for other ancient authors, and thus Ovid was subjected to the highest form of edification.

Responses and Respondents

In this book, I describe textual engagements with Ovid’s exile as ‘responses’ and the medieval subjects who write these engagements ‘respondents’. These responses I define largely as a text which engages with Ovid’s exile poetry or the figure of Ovid in exile: this might be refracted through the language of Ovid’s exile poetry, by adopting the persona of Ovid in exile or otherwise by evoking distinctive features of Ovid in exile. ‘Respondent’ refers to both readers and writers, acknowledging that these were often overlapping groups in the Middle Ages.

A response is a more active expression of reception (where audiences ‘receive’), which itself is a more active iteration of the older concepts of ‘classical influence’ or ‘classical tradition’. The paradigm shift from ‘tradition’ to ‘reception’ in classics has established ‘the active role played by receivers’, in Charles Martindale’s words.Footnote ⁹⁶ As a recent study of classical reception summarises:

Active is the basic precept of this book, arguing that the respondents to Ovid’s exile – first, Ovid himself, and then later medieval audiences – respond as well as simply receive. In addition, while the active participation of audiences is no longer a contested concept in classical reception studies, my use of ‘responses’ and ‘respondents’ is a particular gesture to the exile poems as letters and to the dialogue in which Ovid and his later respondents engage. The epistolary form of Ovid’s exile poetry fundamentally expects and invites a response, and many of the medieval respondents in this book enact some sort of sending-back, whether back to Ovid or outwards to their circles or to the wider medieval world. This distinctive feature of Ovid’s poetry is another reason why the exile poetry is particularly important for our understanding of Ovid’s medieval reception, and more broadly for reception studies as a whole.

There are some methodological complications to the binaries enacted by ‘text and response’ and its corollary ‘author and respondent’. Firstly, ‘text and response’ implies a sharp separation between an originary text and its later readers and respondents, and perhaps also a stable version of that text from which every reader responded (an original, authentic or authorially approved version of Ovid’s poems). In reality, these readers and respondents were responsible for changes to the texts as they were transmitted, which were in turn considered part of the authoritative text. The instability of the textual transmission of ancient works is a well-worn consideration in deeming any text authoritative. Respondents across the chronological and geographical scope of this work (the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, primarily in England but also on the continent, especially in France and Germany) did not have access to one single edition of Ovid’s exile poetry. These are common caveats in reception studies. With all this being said, there have not been doubts as to the authenticity of the exile poetry thus far, with editions primarily acknowledging the complexity of the textual tradition rather than disputing entire poems.Footnote ⁹⁸ The ‘author and respondent’ binary is disturbed by Ovid himself, who firmly establishes that he is both author and respondent in the exile poetry. By reflecting on his exile in the exilic works and by revising his past works, Ovid invites future audiences to respond to the source material he provides. This invitation is enthusiastically taken up in the later Middle Ages, with diverse and creative approaches to reading, rewriting and even becoming Ovid in exile. It is precisely by taking Ovid’s example to heart which allows for a text like De vetula to be created, including the perception of Ovid peering over a book (possibly even his own book) which is on the front cover of this book.Footnote ⁹⁹

The medieval responses to Ovid’s exile which this book explores are primarily produced between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries, loosely covering the aetas Ovidiana which later medieval audiences experienced and contributed towards. The medieval Ovid patently did not appear suddenly in ad 1100, and so at points I have found it necessary to explore the relevant textual and poetic Ovidian traditions leading up to the twelfth century (particularly in Chapter 2, on manuscripts of Ovid’s exile poetry before ad 1100, and in Chapter 4, where figures such as Modoin and Baudri of Bourgueil inaugurate the concept of ‘becoming the exile’ in the Middle Ages).

The geographical centre of this book is England: Chapters 5 and 6 take John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer as their subjects, two London-based Ricardian poets, and as such the textual and literary examples I develop in the preceding chapters are aimed towards developing the environments which shaped how these two poets encountered Ovid in exile. I therefore centre England, but I do not exclude the continent, not least because English responses are foundationally influenced by the responses which were being produced on the continent, especially in the compilatory and scholastic traditions emerging there, and in the poetry of Christine de Pizan, Guillaume de Deguileville and Guillaume de Machaut, all of whom I discuss at length in this book (in Chapters 3 and 6). The reception of Ovid in medieval Italy has been admirably treated by Catherine Keen, Robert Black and Julie Van Peteghem.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Dante, one of the most famous medieval exiles, has also been considered in the light of Ovid’s exile, where Ovid’s model of exile is often compared with the model provided by Brunetto Latini, Dante’s mentor.Footnote ¹⁰¹

The variety across responses in this book is in some sense unsurprising: they are determined by the particular configuration of Ovid which respondents knew, by the various contexts in which they were writing and by the specific ways in which they wanted to portray their auctor and their own poetic selves. These responses can in part be understood as products of several changes across the period and the speed at which these changes occurred in different communities. Between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, the practices of reading and the authority of the written word changed dramatically; there were fundamental shifts in medieval schooling and how Latin and classical cultures were taught and understood; and vernacular languages developed across Europe as new vehicles for expressing authority. The sheer proliferation of Ovid’s exile in the aetas Ovidiana also prompted diffuse responses, and together they are a testament to the popularity and importance of Ovidian exile in the later Middle Ages.

However, there are similarities and trends which can be observed across the examples in this book, and so I have grouped them by the proliferation of Ovidian exilic forms (in Chapter 2) and by their desire to resurrect Ovid in some way (in Chapter 3). Chapters 4, 5 and 6 then explore various poets who are linked in their inhabitation of Ovidian exile. Across all these responses, the most persistent similarity is a type of playfulness in engaging with Ovid and his exile – perhaps surprising given the central misery of the exile poetry. Even in the most serious of responses, we often see a ludic desire to outdo Ovid at his own game – a game in which he has invited them to engage in the playfulness of his own writing.Footnote ¹⁰² Hexter refers to the medieval impulse of ‘out-Oviding Ovid’: the invitation to posterity proffered by Ovid in the exile poetry was enthusiastically taken up by medieval respondents, responding to Ovid’s playfulness in asking, as well as the content of his life and poetry.Footnote ¹⁰³ Imitation bleeds into inhabitation, in the poets who become Ovid in exile in some way, adopting his exilic persona to articulate their own poetic authority. The Epilogue brings the ‘outdoing’ of Ovid to its logical endpoint, in an examination of a forgery of Ovid which inhabits Ovidian exile to the point of creating a new text entirely (the thirteenth-century De vetula).

Medieval Responses to Ovid’s Exile, then, explores a medieval reception of Ovidian exile which is not any one thing, a natural outcome of responding to a diverse author who himself is diffuse and contradictory. Ovid might have been surprised by the sheer profusion and variety in these responses, although he may well have been rather pleased about the appointment of two centuries as the ‘age of Ovid’ (the aetas Ovidiana). With the caveat of diversity standing, these responses are consistent in one further unifying way: they are constantly shaped by Ovid himself, in the model which he provides for responding to his poetry, the pressures he places on understanding the truth or fiction of his works, his deservedness of a place in libraries and in the minds of readers, and the particular themes which Ovid foregrounds and to which medieval respondents duly direct their attention. If the letters comprising Ovid’s exile poetry went unanswered in his own lifetime, they receive such an enthusiastic and engaging set of responses in the Middle Ages that they must be considered when we read the Tristia, ex Ponto, Ibis or indeed any of Ovid’s poetry.