Medieval Ovid Frame Narrative and Political Allegory

Medieval Ovid uncovers the impetus for the floruit of Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman story compilations throughout late medieval Western Europe. Previously disregarded as encyclopedic fodder for practicing moralizing exegesis, these works actually originate from widely disseminated (yet previously unanalyzed) commentaries used by students, scholars, and secular readers studying Ovid's composition strategies. Rather than sanitize Ovid's Metamorphoses, most editions regarded the poem as an intricately interwoven frame narrative whose inset tales commented on each other as well as on the author's historical context as a disgruntled political exile determined to depict vitiated hegemonies throughout human history. Such readings appealed to late medieval writers in communal areas, areas that repeatedly challenged monarchic and oligarchic control, and that discovered space for socio-political discourse within Ovidian frame narratives. Here, Gerber reclassifies medieval appropriators of ancient lore, not as passive and moralizing recipients, but as active and politically motivated composers.

Amanda J. Gerber is Assistant Professor at Eastern New Mexico University, USA.

1.Introduction: Reframing the Frame Narrative
2.Rethinking Ovid: The Commentary Tradition
3.Communal Narrative: Boccaccio and the Historical Paraphrase Tradition
4.Clerical Expansion and Narrative Diminution in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
5.Overlapping Mythologies: The Political Afterlives of Frame Narratives in Gower's Confessio Amantis and Lydgate's Fall of Princes
6.Conclusion