from Part I - Responding to Exile
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 May 2025
Chapter 3 examines the consanguinity of Ovid’s two bodies, or corpora: his body of work (his textual corpus) and his physical body, which here represents his living body, corpse, tomb and biographical life. Medieval commentators took great interest in the relationship between Ovid’s bodies, responding diversely to the opportunities – and challenges – posed by Ovid’s insistent focus on the relationship. Their responses illuminate the mechanisms by which Ovid was transformed from an immoral, salacious poet to a moral, edifying one. A surprising element of that metamorphosis is that the pagan Ovid became a justifiably Christian poet for the medieval age. The chapter discusses Ovid’s presentation of his corpora in the exile poetry and the medieval obsession with Ovid’s tomb, before focusing on three medieval case studies: the Nolo Pater Noster anecdote, a medieval Latin narrative where two clerics are visited by the spirit of Ovid; Guillaume de Deguileville’s Le pèlerinage de la vie humaine and John Lydgate’s English rendering of the text, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, where a figure on pilgrimage encounters Ovid’s exilic revenant; and Christine de Pizan’s Le livre de la cité des dames, in which Ovid is resurrected only to be castrated.
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