For narrative and theme, space like time is a key element in the Fasti of Ovid as well as the Metamorphoses. After an initial exploration of the programmatic establishment of the theme of place in each poem, this chapter focuses on the thematic use of geography in the Fasti. The first section reflects on the prominence given to Rome’s physical and metaphorical place in the world: it is the city to which migrants travel, from which armies depart, to which victorious generals return with new sacra. The poem also treats Rome as urban space, and uses topography to help give meaning to sequences of adjacent temples and festivals. The final section touches on how Ovid’s own exile gives depth to the presentation both of Rome and of travel in the wider world: things are out of place.

This chapter focuses on the episode of Hippolytus and Egeria in Ov. Met. 15.479–551, and particularly on the relation between the content of the two stories told (Hippolytus’ death and rebirth; Egeria’s metamorphosis) and the space in which they are told. The inner story, recounted by Hippolytus himself, involves the characters (Hippolytus, Theseus, Phaedra) in a well-known plot, with a tragic outcome and a Greek setting. The frame of the story is the Latian wood of Aricia, in which the rites in honour of Diana/Lucina, goddess of birth and fertility, take place: here we have no story of violence and death, but of rebirth (Hippolytus/ Virbius), devotion and fidelity (Numa and Egeria). The place rewrites the destinies of the characters involved: the space of Rome is the one in which Ovid celebrates not (only) the political power of Augustus, whose mother comes from Aricia, but more and most prominently the cultural power that Augustan poetry has to give life to a new mythology of regeneration and transformation of old forms (Hippolytus) into new ones (Virbius).

Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a history of the world down to his own time, and Ovid shows a sophisticated understanding of the ancient systems of chronology and chronography that were conventionally used in such histories. He distorts conventional ways of organising past time in order to disrupt the Augustan view of teleological progress towards a pre-ordained world order.

Although there appears to be a lot in common between Ovid’s Fasti and Metamorphoses in terms of how they connect the present to the past through aetiology, the chapter argues that in fact there are profound differences in the role of aetiology in each poem. The Fasti is full of examples of past actions that have become fixed in a form that endures in current ritual, but there are vanishingly few examples of ritual aetiology in the Metamorphoses. The Fasti is really about religion while the Metamorphoses is really about mythology. Even though scholars of religion in both the ancient and modern worlds have seen a tight connection between myth and ritual, the chapter argues that we should follow Ovid in disavowing the myth/ritual nexus.

This chapter turns to the comic counterpart of Romeo and Juliet, written about the same time with as deep an engagement with Ovid. Dream, however, marks Shakespeare’s shift to thinking about Ovid’s bold, parrhesiastic verse and voice through the Metamorphoses rather than the Amores. Shakespeare taps Ovid’s poem of changes and changed bodies as his own, parallel contribution to the animated and parrhesiastic theater of his day, following and paralleling Marlowe. The chapter explores the trail-blazing path that Shakespeare’s Ovidian girls, Hermia and Helena, make in their pursuit of a dual goal: bold speech and marriage to the man of their desires. The dual goals are incompatible, as the chapter reveals. And so the Athenian and deeply Ovidian girls of the play hand the torch of parrhesiastic speech over to the artisan-actors, who perform the play within the play and participate in the huge send-up that Shakespeare’s acting troupe provides for those members of its aristocratic audience who have no respect for the craftsmen also in attendance to this play and others like it.

Chaucer’s God considers how characters invoke God, both in terms of the everyday language of late medieval England and in the ways that the idea of God is reflected in Chaucer’s fiction. Conventional, non-theological utterances of the names for God by Chaucer’s characters as part of their, by turns, outwardly pious and unthinkingly impious phraseologies are discussed in the opening section, God Woot – ‘God knows’. Under the heading God Forwoot – ‘God foreknows’, some of the more challenging invocations of God are considered, such as the implications of divine foreknowledge and predestination on human free will in the Knight’s Tale, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde. The concluding section, God in a Cruel World, asks whether in the Clerk’s Tale and the Franklin’s Tale, if Chaucer allowed his tales to reflect, and characters to reflect upon, the heretical notion of a God lacking in compassion for humanity.

Rather than trawl through medieval philosophical texts for references to selfhood, I analyse a story Chaucer knew well: that of Narcissus and Echo. Narcissus’s fatal encounter with his own reflection suggests a number of points: i) that self-awareness is associated with sight (the word ‘introspection’ means ‘looking within’); ii) that beauty also is associated with sight; iii) that love makes one self-aware (Narcissus understands that his love-object is himself, not that that helps him any); iv) that sight can be ironically linked to moral blindness. Chaucer explores all these points, often with reference to mirrors, and to women in love or being loved. Medieval mirrors were usually small and convex, requiring the viewer to stand close to interpret the distorted images from multiple angles that they generated. Chaucer especially represents women experiencing how it feels to ‘be me’, making of his own poetry a mirror that reflects from oblique positions.