Frank T. Coulson and Justin Haynes here offer an edition and English translation of the Ovidius moralizatus, or Moralized Ovid, of Pierre Bersuire. As they explain, the text has a somewhat complicated history. Bersuire composed the first version, known as A1, was composed in Avignon around 1340, and subsequently revised and expanded into a version known as A2. After moving to Paris in 1350, Bersuire further revised the text by adding material from the vernacular Ovide moralisé and John Ridewall’s Fulgentius metaforalis. The Moralized Ovid was intended as part of a much larger work known as the Reductorium morale, but tended to circulate on its own, and was highly influential both within and outside of France. The text published by Frank T. Coulson and Justin Haynes is actually that of the 1509 printed version produced by Jodocus Badius, not that of Bersuire’s own first, second, or third recension. The print version was based on Bersuire’s earliest recension, but introduced changes not seen in any surviving manuscripts--most notably, according to Coulson and Haynes, the rearrangement of the individual myths to correspond to Ovid’s own arrangement, not the altered order that Bersuire had used. As a result, while the moral and theological glosses are those of Bersuire, the order in which they appear is not the same as his. Maintaining the arrangement of Badius’s print edition does make sense when that is the text being presented, with its spellings and variant readings; rearranging tales to reflect the original order without also giving the original text would be artificial. In that sense, the decision is understandable and makes sense. And early modernists will no doubt appreciate access to the form in which this text circulated in the sixteenth century. Medievalists, however, will be frustrated at not having access to the order in which Bersuire originally grouped the myths. It would have been very interesting to have had, at least, a table showing the current order of tales compared to that employed by Bersuire.
The editors further justify their decision by arguing that modern readers will find it easier to navigate the text if it follows the progression of tales found in Ovid, but I found this less convincing. My own instinct, and surely that of most modern readers, is to consult the index as a way of finding a given tale. Unfortunately, this index is woefully, and mysteriously, insufficient: while a number of the mythological characters are listed, by no means all of them are. In the end I found that I had to consult the index of my copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in order to locate where in the text a given character appeared, and then search in that general vicinity in Bersuire’s text to see if he had included them. Given the lack of a real index, then, I suppose that following Ovid’s ordering rather than that of Bersuire does make the work easier to consult.
The text opens with the “Forms and Figures of the Gods,” that is, a description of how certain deities are depicted in the visual arts. Bersuire explains that he arrived at this knowledge thanks to consultation of various authoritative texts, including a work by Petrarch which he does not identify, but which the editors identify as Africa; he also draws on the Third Vatican Mythographer. Deities covered here include those associated with the then-known planets along with several others. The descriptions are interesting in themselves, and include explanations of the iconographic details.
The individual myths are not normally given historical interpretations; Bersuire concentrates on Christian and moral allegory, pointing out that others have already written about the literal meaning and that, in any case, not all myths can even be said to have any factual basis. For the most part, his readings are the standard ones that also appear in such works as the Vatican Mythographers and the Ovide moralisé, though he does draw on--and often acknowledges--a variety of other sources such as Aristotle, Boethius, Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, Vincent of Beauvais, Fulgentius, and of course the Bible. The scriptural, Patristic, philosophical, and theological authorities that he cites are not necessarily used as the basis for glossing mythological characters themselves, but are often employed as glosses on the mythographic reading. In Book 8, for example, his reading of Icarus includes a disquisition on the importance of avoiding extremes and following the “middle path,” which he elaborates with the example of Rehoboam, son of Solomon, in I Kings, and finishes off with a quotation from Boethius’s Contra Eutychen et Nestorium.
Though Bersuire’s readings are often familiar from other medieval mythographic texts, I did find some surprises in his descriptions of deities and his glossing of individual tales. In the opening section, for example, we are told that Mercury is sometimes depicted as a man and sometimes as a woman, while Bacchus has the body of a young man but the face of a lady. Later, I was perhaps even more surprised to learn that the name of the Cyclops Polyphemus is explained as a combination of “poly” (many) and “phemus” (woman)--explained by the editors as resulting from Bersuire’s spelling “Polyfemus”--indicating Polyphemus’s nature as an effeminate man. Effeminacy might seem far indeed from the character of the ferocious, man-eating Cyclops, but Bersuire here follows the familiar interpretation of masculinity as denoting moral or spiritual strength, and femininity as denoting weakness or depravity. In a similar vein, he explains Bacchus’s female visage as denoting either the lustful desire for women, or the more general moral lapses, of men drunk on wine. In a somewhat similar vein, Mercury’s unstable gender allows him to be a figure for lawyers, masters at fraudulent and fictional words and transformations. A positive reading is also applied to Mercury, whose vacillation between male and female forms reflects his capacity to be sometimes virtuous and strong, and other times soft, kind, and compassionate; in this respect, he is compared with the Apostle Paul, who claimed in I Corinthians 9:22 to be “all things to all people.” Further comments on the gender fluidity of Mercury, and on gender changes or ambiguities in other figures, recur throughout the book. This feature of Bersuire’s commentary will certainly be of interest to specialists in gender and transgender studies.
In all, this volume offers a wealth of fascinating material, adding an immensely important text to those already available for the study of the medieval and early modern reception of Ovidian myths, as well as the complex practices of moral and allegorical readings of pagan texts. The lucid English translation and informative notes will make it accessible not only to experienced scholars but also to students newly discovering medieval mythography.