9 - Dire Potter, a medieval Ovid

Summary

GOWER, CHAUCER AND THE MEDIEVAL OVID

In the medieval schools the works of Ovid were continuously read and reread and commented upon. If one turns up one of the hundreds of medieval Ovid manuscripts one can be pretty sure that more will show itself than the bare texts of the Metamorphoses, Heroides, Ars Amatoria or Remedia Amoris. The codices are teeming with interlinear and marginal glosses and scholia: short elucidations, explanations of a word, further explications, at times detailed comments. More than once the leaves are filled to the brim with explanatory notes, and if a manuscript is chosen and opened at random there is every chance that an introduction will be found preceding the work, an accessus ad auctorem.

In most cases medieval authors, when writing in the vernacular and adapting Ovidian material, have undoubtedly drawn directly on their knowledge of the texts-with-glosses. It is an established fact that for his Confessio Amantis John Gower used, among other things, the ‘medieval Ovid’; the same goes for Chaucer with respect to his Legend of Good Women. It is also well known that they do not translate the classical examples unthinkingly. For instance, if Gower or Chaucer take up the Heroides for the Confessio or Legend, they refashion the Ovidian letters into narratives; as a result the setting will be entirely different from the original one.