Medieval Responses to Ovid’s Exile is not merely a valuable contribution to the study of the medieval reception of the poetry Ovid wrote while relegated to Tomis on the Black Sea during the last decade of his life. It is itself an exemplary model of reception history. It balances breadth of coverage in Part I (“Responding to Exile”) with a focus on fourteenth-century England in Part II (“Becoming the Exile), indeed, on specific works by John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer considered against the backdrop of the troubled reign of Richard II. But it is not only in her analyses of the presence of the exiled Ovid in the works of the English poets where one finds specificity and new insights. Throughout, when Menmuir is excavating the responses represented by accessus, glosses, and florilegia, she references specific manuscripts and, to the extent possible, the circumstances not only of their creation but of their circulation. For example, citing manuscripts that moved from Benedictine monasteries to Oxford college libraries, she observes that the “overlaps between the monastic and the secular in the later Middle Ages means that the concept of a ‘scholastic sphere’ is more useful here” (56).
In the “Introduction” (1-26), Menmuir explains all that her capacious model of response encompasses. She opens chapter 1 (“Ovid’s Response,” 29-48) with the observation that Ovid is “the first respondent to his exile” (29), but this is not a mere conceit. She shows how Ovid’s polyvalent perspectives on his exile are echoed in the correspondingly polyvalent reactions of those readers who have left traces of their responses in forms that range from manicules to original compositions, from passages chosen to be included in a florilegium to anecdotes about Ovid’s tomb, and from marginal annotations to educators’ judgments (chapter 2, “Forming Responses,” 49-89, and chapter 3, “Resurrecting Ovid,” 90-121).
Throughout, Menmuir displays a familiarity with the entirety of Ovid’s exile poetry that only a few classicists can boast. Valuably and appropriately, Menmuir considers responses not only to the epistles Ovid dispatched from Tomis in two collections (Tristia and ex Ponto) but also to the Ibis, often opaque in its erudition but not unknown in the medieval period, and (less frequently) to the double letters ofHeroides 16-21, arguably also composed by the exiled Ovid.
Menmuir notes “the shifting tone of the exile poetry” (7) and elsewhere describes “the exile poetry [a]s defined by its ambiguities and equivocations” (30). Certainly, Ovid’s writings from Tomis are far from univocal. For one thing, the epistles are addressed to different individuals. And even when not the formal addressee, looming over the collections is Augustus (succeeded by Tiberius), whom Ovid the exile must appease if he is ever to be recalled and, at the same time, to whose ultimate power Ovid the poet refuses to bow. For subsequent readers, what emerges is, as Menmuir phrases it, “[t]je ambiguity of Ovidian sincerity” (8). Looking ahead, she writes, “Part II of this book is concerned with how medieval poets revoiced such a complex personal voice” (9). This provides a clear and yet malleable framework: “Ovid in exile creates a model which is both authoritative and ambiguous, a model which could be followed both in responding to Ovid’s exile and for medieval poets fashioning their own poetic selves...Ovid becomes not only the first respondent to his exile but the model for future responses, too” (30).
Upon opening most manuscripts of Ovid, readers would encounter accessus—relatively formulaic introductions—which almost invariably included a summary of the author’s life. This virtually guaranteed that Ovid’s works were read and studied in light of the poet’s biography, and given the unique importance of exile in his career, “the exilic Ovid came to define Ovid’s entire output.” (59) It is the fact of exile and the tears and lamentations of the exiled Ovid that opened the way to narratives of Ovid’s “redemption.” Menmuir ably advances the idea that through his punishment and his repentance (however sincere, however limited), Ovid’s trajectory can be made to fit a Christian arc of sin and redemption. One can detect traces of such an interpretation behind the views of educators like Conrad of Hirsau and Alexander Neckham, who would have students avoid Ovid’s erotic poetry but endorse the ex Ponto. It subtends as well the narrative arc of the pseudo-Ovidian De vetula, even if what motivates the “conversion” of the “Ovid” in that wild fantasy is not exile but disappointment and disillusionment in earthly love.
Among the many virtues of Menmuir’s study is her attention to some of the pseudo-Ovidiana, not only De vetula, which figures prominently in Menmuir’s “Epilogue: Forging Exile” (210-221), but the Nux, which some scholars of Ovid believe just might be genuine. She brilliantly shows that if the Nux “is Ovidian, it is certainly exilic, and if not, the Ovidian imitator is consciously situating the poem in Ovid’s exilic phase” (86). She offers manuscript evidence that some medieval readers linked it to the exile poetry. Of this, the prime example is Oxford, BL MS Auct. F.2.14 [s. xii3-4), where verses from ex Ponto (2.7.37-48) are added at the end of “perhaps the earliest extant witness of the Nux” (86). Nor are these just any verses from ex Ponto: “the final sentiment of the excerpted passage is one which is recognizable from across Ovid’s exile poetry: his downfall has been caused by his own genius. The copyist of Auct. F.2.14 therefore chooses a passage which is entirely suited to the tone of the Nux,...a passage replete with some of the most recognizable Ovidian exilic lines,...which represent the fundamental nature of the exilic poetry” (87). As Menmuir reads this copyist’s “response,” “one exilic Ovid is augmented with another, and the twelve lines of the ex Ponto supplement the Nux, bringing the voice of the exiled poet out from behind the allegory of the nut tree...In the twelfth century, Conrad of Hirsau singles out the Nux and the ex Ponto as edifying texts which are worthy of study: here they are linked in a pedagogically inclined manuscript as a single edifying exilic work” (87).
Equally productive is the way Menmuir “reads” the florilegial Ovid, the Ovid represented by excerpts: “While glosses and annotations on the exile poetry contextualise Ovid’s exile within expanding spheres of knowledge, and accessus to Ovidian works provide intertextual information before one reaches the work itself, florilegia and other excerpted forms of Ovid achieve something quite different. Ovid’s exile is stripped back to just one or two verses at a time, which are transplanted into new compilatory forms. The connection between the life and the work is thus severely tested in the form of the excerpted Ovid: this response to Ovid’s exile sees his exile being primed for new contexts rather than reinforcing old ones” (77).
As noted above, the second part of the book focuses on Gower and Chaucer, contemporaries writing in Ricardian England, but in preparation Menmuir reviews and contrasts the Latin responses to Ovid’s exile poetry of Modoin in particular among Carolingian poets (132-135) and of Baudri of Bourgueil in particular among the high medieval Latin poets active in and around Loire (135-140). Vernacular authors to whose work Menmuir attends include Guillaume de Deguileville, the second recension of whose Le pèlerinage de la vie humaine was translated by John Lydgate as The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, Guillaume de Machaut, and Christine de Pizan.
In chapter 5 (148-176), Menmuir explores how John Gower constructs a significant portion of the Visio Anglie, the first book of his Latin Vox Clamantis, out of Ovidian verses selected disproportionately from the exile poetry. “For Gower and other medieval poets, Ovid provided a model for writing the self. It is...through writing as Ovid in exile that Gower is able to speak with a type of experiential authority, a model which only the exilic Ovid is able to provide. In other words, Ovid enables the experiential voice of an exile in the Visio, allowing Gower to speak as though from experience with the weight of classical authority behind him” (154).
Menmuir turns her attention to Chaucer in chapter 6 (177-209), first to Troilus and Criseyde and then, more briefly, to the “Prologue” to the Legend of Good Women and the “Retraction” that follows what we have of Canterbury Tales. In Troilus and Criseyde, Menmuir argues, Chaucer deploys echoes of the exiled Ovid to give voice to Troilus’s mewling and the narrator’s own humblebragging, in other words, the Ovid who obsequiously begs pardon of the emperor who exiled him but who nonetheless finds ways proudly to proclaim that his own verses will outlast and thus trump imperial power. To cite Menmuir’s own lapidary summation, “[t]he narrator [of Troilus and Criseyde] becomes the Ovidian exilic poet, but Troilus becomes the Ovidian exilic sufferer” (191).
A yet more nuanced self-positioning on the part of Chaucer-poet emerges in the “Prologue” to theLegend of Good Women: “At the heart of the Prologue to the Legend is the fraught relationship between imperilled poet and intransigent ruler(s), and this is a model which, for Chaucer, only Ovid in exile can adequately provide...Becoming the Ovidian exile, in his indirect, ambiguous way, therefore allows Chaucer to present a response to Richard II’s rule which evades culpability, as well as emphasizing the perils which accompany living in tumultuous times” (197).
The quibbles I have are few and minor. Menmuir briefly considers whether what Gower is doing in those portions of the Visio Anglie that are comprised of Ovidian lines and distichs stitched together is akin to the late antique practice of the cento. To my mind, she rather too quickly rejects the notion based on Ausonius’s definition, which she cites (154-155). If, however, one were to take Proba’s Vergilian cento as the model, the case would be much stronger. There, one author—Vergil—is the source of the quoted material. The original contexts are discernible the way the original text of a palimpsest is: partially and with difficulty. Meanwhile, the “upper” text programmatically displays its distance from the “lower,” now erased text over which it is written. My analogy, and likely not perfect, but I find it nonetheless suggestively akin to what Menmuir sees in Visio Anglie 33-38: “the presence of Ovid in Gower is neither homogenizing cento nor decontextualizing florilegic approach but more of a layering, a perforated double vision which Gower encourages” (156). [1] This seems even more significantly the case when it comes to Gower’s adaptations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which Menmuir describes as “a tool of distancing” where citations from the Metamorphoses are juxtaposed with “quotations from the exile poetry” (165). Perhaps I suffer from the syndrome of seeing a mise-en-abîme around every corner, but for this portion of Visio 16, Gower cannibalizes the Achaemenides episode of Metamorphoses 14, where Ovid himself is revisiting an unforgettable moment in book 3 of Vergil’s Aeneid, where Vergil himself programmatically augmented and thus revised an incident in the Homeric Odyssey.
When Menmuir writes of “Ovid’s Ethical Credentials” (18-22), she is playing off the obligatory statement in so many of the accessus that the work in question ethicae subponitur, in other words, that it is categorized as belonging to the ethical “part of philosophy” (pars philosophiae). Given her use of “moral” throughout this section, I have some concern that readers might infer that the categorization of works as “ethical” implies that they model good ethical behavior and are “moral” in the sense of “morally acceptable.” These works (whether by Ovid or other auctores) are “ethical” quite simply because they deal with human behavior. Likewise, rather than translate “quia in unaquaque epistola agit de moribus” as “that they deal with morals” (21), I would prefer the more value-neutral “human customs.”
It might seem churlish to complain that the abundant signposting the author provides to guide readers through the organizational plan of her book, and even more the introductions that preview arguments that are then argued at greater length subsequently, at times come across as repetitive. Occasionally, what seems to be an urge to nail everything down is oppressive. Referring to the political and other tumult of fourteenth-century England, Menmuir writes, “Dissatisfaction and disaffection were prevailing moods of the age: it is easy to see why Ovid’s exile poetry might resonate with the discontent” (141). This formulation seems too facile and generalized.
There is a way in which “becoming the exile” can seem like it encompasses all that engages every poet trying to negotiate a place in the grander scheme of things: “Chaucer takes on Ovid’s exilic voice to represent what it means to be a poet, to write under pressure from poetic or political figures and to negotiate literary immortality for himself and his works—all features which underwrite the exile poetry and which demonstrate an immersive understanding of what it meant to be a poetic exile, whether or not Chaucer historically experienced isolation or marginalization.” (177). She quotes Petrarch (Fam. 22.2) to support the idea “that the source most important is most subsumed, and therefore may be less visible” (178), which could lead a wag to point out that Menmuir finds the exiled Ovid both when there are abundant quotations drawn from him and when there are none.
Despite these minor quibbles, Menmuir’s is an extraordinarily rich and valuable study. Even my suggestion that now and then a line or two could be excised recalls multiple earlier moments in the reception of Ovid. Menmuir describes how “[i]n all three iterations of the [Nolo Pater Noster anecdote], two figures stumble upon Ovid’s tomb...They read his epitaph...from the Tristia...and they find out which lines of his are best and worst. A voice, presumably Ovid’s, thunders forth from the tomb, answering both questions” (99). Here, “best” and “worst” reflect standard Christian ideas of virtue. Uncannily, the motif of the “best and worst” lines in Ovid takes us back to Ovid’s own lifetime via an anecdote reported by Ovid’s slightly older, long-lived contemporary, Seneca the Elder (Controversiae 2.12). When some of Ovid’s friends asked him to remove what they considered were his three “worst” lines—their criteria were style and taste—Ovid agreed on the condition that he could first pick three lines that could never be removed. Naturally, they were the same three lines.
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1. For the phrase and concept “perforated text” Menmuir credits Maura Nolan, “The Poetics of Catastrophe: Ovidian Allusion in Gower’s Vox Clamantis,” in Christopher Cannon and Maura Nolan, eds., Medieval Latin and Middle English Literature: Essays in Honour of Jill Mann (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2011), 113-33.