It’s hard to express the majestic sense of pleasure I had in opening up the package from TMR containing these three beautiful, hardbound volumes of the medieval French Ovide moralisé (OM) in its first ever translation into English (or any other modern language) from the OF original (c. 1320). The volume is a labor of love that extended over decades, led by K. Sarah-Jane Murray and Matthieu Boyd, though, as the generous Preface makes clear, several scholars of medieval French literature made individual contributions to the translation (see xi). The OM is one of the most extensive, encyclopedic commentaries on a classical text and a foundational work for our understanding of the Metamorphoses and the reception of the medieval Ovid. The three volumes display vast research into sources, traditions, editions, and manuscripts of the OM and reflect a profound commitment to honor the text, which is itself the culmination of centuries of critical/allegorical theory, and ethical-poetic practice. As the editors note, the OM is “a fascinating case study in medieval thinking” that “opens a unique window into the culture, religion, politics, and intellectual climate of France, and, by extension, Western Europe, c1320” (1).

The commentary tradition, seen here at its most spectacular and extended, was the central vehicle for the preservation of Classical literature during the Christian Middle Ages and points to the power and influence of the Metamorphoses, the greatest and most influential Latin classical text, along with the Aeneid, in France and all throughout Europe. As it says at one point in the introduction, the OM may be “France’s own Divine Comedy” (13). The translation is obviously designed for scholars and is not a classroom text per se, but I don’t doubt that teachers will find a way to get this into the graduate classroom on reserve and that this new resource will be used widely in studies of the medieval commentary tradition, medieval literary theory, and reception history. Its publication—so expert, clear, accessible and detailed—Is a major event for students of the medieval Ovid and of the Metamorphoses itself.

This is a book I wish I had when I wrote Chaucer’s Ovidian Arts of Love (University Press of Florida, 1994). As a prelude to looking at Ovid’s influence in the Troilus and the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, I wrote a chapter on the medieval reception of Ovid that was relevant to understanding Chaucer’s treatment of the Classical poet, including the potential role of the commentary tradition, as represented by works like the OM. In my monograph, I militated somewhat against the assertion of John Fyler that Chaucer “took his Ovid straight” (Calabrese 3), and I used the accessus and commentary traditions to argue that Chaucer based the arc of his personal and poetic life upon his understanding of the life of Ovid—his trials, exile, and combative adventures with love and politics—all of which Chaucer would have learned from the Ovidian commentary tradition.

My study was mainly confined to the understanding of the vita Ovidii as depicted in the Amatory Poems and in their medieval framing and reception (the Metamorphoses appeared here and there in a few episodes in the Troilus I read closely, including Ovid’s story of Myrrha (Calabrese 55-57). So I knew that the commentary tradition on the Metamorphoses was of such a magnitude that it would have to be taken up in a separate work by others, as the field of Ovidian studies expanded. The task has been taken up by other authors including Jamie Fumo and many other critics. And now, 30 years after I wrote of Ovid and Chaucer, this beautifully translated and beautifully presented resource will further enliven source studies of medieval vernacular literature. I look forward to seeing the scholarship on Chaucer, and on a score of other medieval writers, that this majestic OM translation will produce, for, as the editors remind us, “the OM helps us better understand how pagan, Ovidian references might have been interpreted and integrated by post OM medieval authors” (61).

The 66-page introduction is an exemplary piece of scholarship, introducing the OM and the medieval Ovidian tradition, and a stellar primer on late classical and Christian ways of reading texts symbolically and allegorically. The introduction uses many clear rubrics to take on essential questions for first-time readers: what is the OM; who wrote it, what was the audience, etc., deepening our appreciation of why someone would take 12,000 lines of Latin and convert it into 72,000 lines of French translation and commentary.

In looking at the OM’s opening assertion of purpose, the editors very helpfully reference Marie De France, whose Prologue to the Lais shows a similar obligation and pride that compel an author to speak when given a great gift from God as an artist. Other interesting questions arise: Is the OM plagiarism because it doesn’t identify its sources? Has the OM made interpretations that essentially violate the text, like Jupiter himself in his predatory behavior, without the consent of the original myths? Interesting questions, but by design beside the point, because “a sympathetic view, taking the Christian text on its own terms—which one wants to be prepared to do to get the most out of reading it—perceives the interaction as a welcoming, compassionate, and nuanced embrace of its classical source” (5).

The OM records the cultural consciousness of how stories, the most famous stories in the world, could be imputed to have almost endless (to us sometimes shocking and surprising) cultural, historical, moral, religious, and spiritual meaning. The target readers were, as with Marie de France and the medieval romances, likely “a courtly audience,” with the literacy and leisure to enjoy and consume such a work: “the text may be episodic, but the primary intention was probably to invite sustained reading and reflection by a select group” (7). And now that reading experience is widely available to an English-speaking audience (and all those for whom the OF editions are daunting or inaccessible). Modern readers will put the OM to various academic uses, but it is critical to remember the original, doctrinal function of this text: “The purpose of the OM is to guide its readers along the straight and narrow path toward Paradise.... [and] “in the meantime, in this life, we are bound to an endless cycle of interpretation, as we attempt to make sense of the world and see beyond the veil of the world, of the stories that surround us, and of the books that we inherit from the past” (11).

Central to the foundation laid in the introduction is Augustine’s great notion of “spoiling the Egyptians,” from the De Doctrina, where he powerfully justifies and encourages the reading of pagan texts when they are in accord with mortal doctrine acceptable to Christians, just as the Israelites, when they fled out of Egypt, took with them implements and utensils that they themselves could put to better use. This provides the locus classicus that 1000 years later culminates in the OM, and it perfectly explains the context in which classical literature was preserved and interpreted. We would oversimplify things to say they “Christianized” the Classics, but medieval academics made the pagan past palatable, meaningful, and even urgent for Christian readers. The OM is thus “the climax of a mythographic tradition that developed for centuries” (13).

The sources used for commentary and the entire corpus of works that influence the OM form what the editors call a “mythographic ecosystem” (17) or an “inter-textual ecosystem” (15) that feeds its complex, rich, overlapping, and sometimes contradictory interpretations. The reception of Ovid, et al cannot be separated from the filters of various early Christian writers who keep company with Ovid in the OM in manuscripts and generally in the cultural zeitgeist of medieval academic study of what we would call literature, which was regarded as “grammar” or “philosophy” in the medieval schoolroom. “This kind of intellectual framework,” the editors tell us, helps us understand that “the author of the OM likely didn’t conceive of his commentary as imposing Christian meaning on of its text...[for] allegorical readings inspired by Ovid’s tales could be seen as valid even when the classical author never intended them and was completely unconscious of them” (24).

The introduction continues with important discussion of Arnulf of Orleans and John of Garland, among other writers in the commentary tradition; then it looks at the arts of preaching (Dominican and Franciscan) and the importance of sermons and other genres that influence (or create a context for understanding) the OM. Courtly romance, for example, is thus akin to theOM as kind of a gloss on ancient authors, “translating the classics into OF, preserving and passing them to future generations” (47).

The editors then offer a couple of case studies, sample expositions that illustrate the interpretive adventure we’re going to have in the OM itself: the stories of Phaeton and of Orpheus, read on the fourfold levels of interpretation (not every tale in the OM get the old-school four-level reading, but many do). It’s complicated: Orpheus’s tale indicates in one sense that homosexuality is wrong, but on another level the young boys that Orpheus has sex with indicate that our desire for God should not be “soft and ‘feminine’” but “spiritually ‘virile’” (64). “These layers of reading,” the editors explain, “can present what seem to be disturbing inconsistencies. An action that is negative on the moral level can be positive on the allegorical or eschatological level, and vice versa...[for] male homosexuality is condemned on the moral level while on the eschatological level, it models humanity’s ideal relationship with God” (64). The introduction ends importantly by identifying strains of antisemitism in the commentary tradition and the real-life effect it had on the Jewish population in fourteenth-century France (65). A comprehensive bibliography follows a helpful a nine-page lexicon, a “sampler of key issues arising” in the translation: exploring resonant terms from the original OF, such as amours/Amours, fole/folie/fole amour, and sapience/savoir/science.

In the OM text itself, which fills the next 1000 pages, readers will go on the most intense, dizzying interpretive adventure of their scholarly lives. It takes a while to get into a reading rhythm—finding Ovid’s words/episodes and then distinguishing the moralization, usually separated by a helpful bold rubric. The editors say that the “OM is not always inspired poetry, but it is poetry” (69) and though they translate the octosyllabic rhymed couplets into prose, they were aware of and sensitive to poetic effect when it did not sacrifice meaning. They note that the translation “grew ever more literal as we revised it” because clarity was more important than grace when grace meant “gracefully fudging something theologically specific” (68).

Most episodes in the main source manuscript feature a miniature, not reproduced here (except for the magnificent cover image) but listed in the translation’s rubrics. And one can look at the images associated with each tale; for the editors have tried to “approximate the experience of reading a medieval book” and to “facilitate studies of text—Image relations by making it easy to follow along with the manuscript images online” (70). It may not be so easy to read a book and study a laptop image at once, but online access to the images is bound bring delight and edification to those with good equipment who can display, focus on, and study those relations. The bibliography has a long web address for the manuscript, Rouen, Bibliothéque municipale, O.4 (1044), but here is the page I arrived at by searching: https://www.rotomagus.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10102188w/f32.item.r=ovide%20moralise.zoom

For the purposes of review, I started with book 1-3 in toto, then searched for favorite tales to mark a new start for a sustained (and joyously unrestrained) reading experience across the 15 books. As I read and so immersed myself in the amazing world of allegorical exposition—and what we called in the 80s “the free play of the signifier”—I let the medieval imagination and its treatment of the poem—accumulated over centuries of religious, critical, and poetic practice—just take me on a journey through meaning, connotation, practical wisdom, mythological digression, hermeneutical exegesis, historical excursus, and plenty of unexpected tangents and assertions. The great themes of the Metamorphoses (when we read it straight) are fluidity, instability, the dangers of desire, the power of our own rationalizations as we pursue (often powerlessly) dangerous, destructive desires that cloud the mind. Keeping these major themes in mind (readers will have their own sets of personal themes) I lost myself in the labyrinth of the OM, resulting in one of the most remarkable, downright Borgesian, experiences that any teacher or scholar could have. One gets much help from the footnotes, which are brilliant reading aids, full of background information, identification of references, and comments on the translation/editorial choices made. All are clear, welcoming, thoughtful, but be warned that if you read the footnotes, your pace will be 10-15 minutes per page—but all captivating.

As you read, you may look for the familiar and the identifiable from Ovid or from Scripture, but best be prepared for the unexpected and the unreconcilable. The OM can also itself be an individual spiritual journey (however broadly one might define the term). For, regardless of religious disposition, one cannot read without introspection, reflection, and self-confrontation—on all the four-fold levels of interpretation. It’s easy to agree with the editors that “ultimately, more than using God to make a case for Ovid, the OM uses Ovid to make a case for God, whom it considers the central point of all that exists and, in Aristotelian fashion, that toward which all truth in the world points” (66). Without that telos, the vast seas of fluid signifiers might seem chaotic, even incoherent, but part of the modern reading experience requires respecting—even if not agreeing theologically with—the author’s doctrinal purpose of bringing the OM’s readers closer to God, the ultimate author of all creation, which includes the “pagan” poet and his book of “forms changed into new bodies.”

From the next thousand pages of exposition, let one further example give a sense of the excitement, the mode, wit, and energy of the commentary. Book 1 tells the story of sacrilegious, cannibal Lycaon who plots against Jove and gets turned into a wolf for his impiety. The OM associates him was the Biblical Herod, “the false and savage-hearted tyrant, full of anger and rage.” When Herod saw he could not trick Christ with false piety “that faint-hearted traitor, that gluttonous wolf, that rapacious wolf, that cruel and destructive wolf, enemy of human nature—he put to death the Innocents and had them massacred in hundreds and thousands, in an attempt to harm God. He was trying to kill him alone, and made many die in his place: this wolf tore those he was pursuing from the bosom of their mothers, spilled their brains, guts, and entrails, cut off their feet and wrists, arms and legs, and presented the souls to God” (150).

But then, on the moral level “the tale can have another meaning. One who skins, strips, and spoils the common people, in order to take possession of the spoils, and devours the humble, resembles a rapacious and harmful wolf. Oh, God, how many such wolves there are nowadays! Wolves who want to test God, wolves that no one can appease, famished wolves, rapacious wolves, wolves that are rabid and pernicious, wolves who eat the flesh and substance of poor people and drink their blood, wolves who go mad on the poor people, wolves who plunder and take everything. Bailiffs, beadles, provosts, and mayors think only of stealing from others. They are all thieves and robbers, and now they are all flayers of men living off looting and pillage, against what is right, against divine law, usurers and loan sharks—and the pastors are the worst” (150-151). But God will punish them, and in Hell these “cruel and rapacious wolves can scream and howl in eternal shame and woe” (151). In the matrices of the OM nothing in Ovid fails to recapitulate the scriptures and the events of salvation history. As the text often says, “the Sacred Page and the tale are compatible” (158).

Ovid said he would live. Vivam! is the last word of the Metamorphoses. And the OM, in both its original crafting 700 years ago, and also here, in this great gift to the academic community orchestrated by Murray and Boyd, he’s proved to have been right, again and again. A detailed 53-page index rounds out the translation, a grand, captivating, once-in-a-generation accomplishment of medieval scholarship.