This volume brings together a range of celebrated and less familiar translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses produced in English between 1480 and 1625, beginning with the story of Narcissus from Caxton’s manuscript translation of the Metamorphoses and ending with George Sandys’s version of Callisto’s tale. The volume as a whole reflects the complex (and shifting) variety of Ovid’s early modern reception. These poems, some of them republished here for the first time, help extend and enrich our understanding of Ovid’s influence on early modern literature. All texts have been fully modernised and annotated, rendering them accessible to students and general readers as well as scholars of the period.

This volume brings together a range of celebrated and less familiar translations of Ovid's Metamorphoses produced in English between 1480 and 1625, beginning with the story of Narcissus from Caxton's manuscript translation of the Metamorphoses and ending with George Sandys's version of Callisto's tale. The volume as a whole reflects the complex (and shifting) variety of Ovid's early modern reception. These poems, some of them republished here for the first time, help extend and enrich our understanding of Ovid's influence on early modern literature. All texts have been fully modernised and annotated, rendering them accessible to students and general readers as well as scholars of the period. Sarah Annes Brown is Professor of English at Anglia Ruskin University. Andrew Taylor is Fellow, Lecturer and Director of Studies in English at Churchill College, Cambridge.

This volume brings together a range of celebrated and less familiar translations of Ovid's Metamorphoses produced in English between 1480 and 1625, beginning with the story of Narcissus from Caxton's manuscript translation of the Metamorphoses and ending with George Sandys's version of Callisto's tale. The volume as a whole reflects the complex (and shifting) variety of Ovid's early modern reception. These poems, some of them republished here for the first time, help extend and enrich our understanding of Ovid's influence on early modern literature. All texts have been fully modernised and annotated, rendering them accessible to students and general readers as well as scholars of the period. Sarah Annes Brown is Professor of English at Anglia Ruskin University. Andrew Taylor is Fellow, Lecturer and Director of Studies in English at Churchill College, Cambridge.

Ovid transformed English Renaissance literary ideas about love, erotic desire, embodiment, and gender more than any other classical poet. Ovidian concepts of femininity have been well served by modern criticism, but Ovid's impact on masculinity in Renaissance literature remains underexamined. This volume explores how English Renaissance writers shifted away from Virgilian heroic figures to embrace romantic ideals of courtship, civility, and friendship. Ovid's writing about masculinity, love, and desire shaped discourses of masculinity across a wide range of literary texts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including poetry, prose fiction, and drama. The book covers all major works by Ovid, in addition to Italian humanists Angelo Poliziano and Natale Conti, canonical writers such as William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, and John Milton, and lesser-known writers such as Wynkyn de Worde, Michael Drayton, Thomas Lodge, Richard Johnson, Robert Greene, John Marston, Thomas Heywood, and Francis Beaumont. Individual essays examine emasculation, abjection, pacifism, female masculinity, boys' masculinity, parody, hospitality, and protean Jewish masculinity. Ovid and Masculinity in English Renaissance Literature demonstrates how Ovid's poetry gave vigour and vitality to male voices in English literature - how his works inspired English writers to reimagine the male authorial voice, the male body, desire, and love in fresh terms.