First English translation of one of the most influential French poems of the Middle Ages. The anonymous Ovide moralisé (Moralized Ovid), composed in France in the fourteenth century, retells and explicates Ovid's Metamorphoses, with generous helpings of related texts, for a Christian audience. Working from the premise that everything in the universe, including the pagan authors of Graeco-Roman Antiquity, is part of God's plan and expresses God's truth even without knowing it, the Ovide moralisé is a massive and influential work of synthesis and creativity, a remarkable window into a certain kind of medieval thinking. It is of major importance across time and across many disciplines, including literature, philosophy, theology, and art history. This three volume set offers an English translation of this hugely significant text - the first into any modern language. Based on the only complete edition to date, that by Cornelis de Boer and others completed in 1938, it also reflects more recent editions and numerous manuscripts. The translation is accompanied by a substantial introduction, situating the Ovide moralisé in terms of the reception of Ovid, the mythographical tradition, and its medieval French religious and intellectual milieu. Notes discuss textual problems and sources, and relate the text to key issues in the thought of theologians such as Bonaventure and Aquinas.

Essays examining both the theory and practice of medieval translation.

First English translation of one of the most influential French poems of the Middle Ages. The anonymous Ovide moralisé (Moralized Ovid), composed in France in the fourteenth century, retells and explicates Ovid's Metamorphoses, with generous helpings of related texts, for a Christian audience. Working from the premise that everything in the universe, including the pagan authors of Graeco-Roman Antiquity, is part of God's plan and expresses God's truth even without knowing it, the Ovide moralisé is a massive and influential work of synthesis and creativity, a remarkable window into a certain kind of medieval thinking. It is of major importance across time and across many disciplines, including literature, philosophy, theology, and art history. This three volume set offers an English translation of this hugely significant text - the first into any modern language. Based on the only complete edition to date, that by Cornelis de Boer and others completed in 1938, it also reflects more recent editions and numerous manuscripts. The translation is accompanied by a substantial introduction, situating the Ovide moralisé in terms of the reception of Ovid, the mythographical tradition, and its medieval French religious and intellectual milieu. Notes discuss textual problems and sources, and relate the text to key issues in the thought of theologians such as Bonaventure and Aquinas.

This book explores the extraordinary influence of Ovid upon the culture - learned, literary, artistic and popular - of medieval Europe.

Transforming Tales argues that the study of transformation is crucial for understanding a wide range of canonical work in medieval French literature. From the lais and Arthurian romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, through the Roman de la Rose and its widespread influence, to the fourteenth-century Ovide moralise and the vast prose cycles of the late Middle Ages, metamorphosis is a recurrent theme, resulting in some of the best-known and most powerful literature of the era. Transforming Tales is the first book in English to explore in detail the importance of ideas of metamorphosis in French literature from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. This book's purpose is twofold: it traces a series of figures (the werewolf, the snake-woman, the nymph, the magician, amongst others) as they are transformed within individual texts; and it also examines the way in which the stories of transformation themselves become rewritten during the course of the Middle Ages. Griffin's approach combines close readings and comparisons of literary texts with readings informed by modern critical theories which are grounded in many of the ideas raised by medieval metamorphosis: the body, gender, identity and categories of life. Literary depictions and reworkings of transformation raise questions about medieval understandings of the differences between human and animal, man and woman, God and man, life and death--these are the questions explored in Transforming Tales.

From the contents:00Part I: Allegorical Dream-Visions and Debate Poems Jonathan Morton, 'Friars in love: Manuscript illumination as literary commentary in three fourteenth-century manuscripts of the Roman de la rose' (Paris, BnF, MS .25526; Baltimore, Walters, MS W. 143;London, BL, MS Royal 19 B XIII) - Emma Cayley, ‘Entre deux sommes’: Imagining desire in the songe de la Pucelle' - HelenJ. Swi , 'Limits of representation in late fifteenth-century Burgundy: What the eye doesn’t hear and the ear doesn’t see'. 00Part II: 'Burgundian prose narratives' Dominique Lagorgette, 'Staging transgression rough text and image: Violence and nudity in the cent nouvelles nouvelles'(Glasgow, University Library, MS Hunter252, and Vérard 1486 and 1498) – Rebecca Dixon, 'The Roman de Buscalus; or, the artof not being French' – Rosalind Brown-Grant, 'Personal drama or chivalric spectacle? The reception of the Roman d’Olivier de Castille in the illuminations of the Wavrin aster and Loyset Liédet'00Part III: Reworkings of classical and Medieval auctores' J. Chimène Bateman, 'The hybrid art of the compiler: Text/Image relations in the Ovidemoralisé of Colard Mansion' – KathleenWilson-Chevalier, 'Proliferating narratives: Texts, images, and (Mostly Female) dedicatees in a few héroïdes productions' – Elizabeth L’Estrange, 'Re-Presenting Emilia in the context of the Querelle des femmes: Text and image in Anne de Graville’s Beau Roman list of manuscripts and early printed editions'