Making a Politic Erasmian Gentleman: Wynkyn de Worde and the first Ars amatoria in English (original) (raw)
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Love's Letters: an Amor-Roma Telestich at Ovid, Ars Amatoria 3.507-10
This paper argues that Ovid deliberately arranged lines 3.507–10 of the Ars Amatoria to have the letters at line end spell out AMOR when read vertically. Together with the last word of the passage, which is itself Amor, this telestich produces a shape that recalls a famous Γ-acrostic in Aratus. Since the relevant Ovidian lines discuss mirrors, they also constitute an invitation to read AMOR backwards as ROMA. The telestich thus emerges as engaging intertextually with a variety of plays on the city's name, including the famous AMOR-ROMA word squares that are preserved in Imperial Roman graffiti. Within the mildly subversive genre of elegy, Ovid's palindromic word play creates a contrast between traditional expressions of Roman military valor—familiar from works like the Aeneid, where an acrostic significantly spells out MARS—and his own world, where the city of ROMA has come to be dominated by AMOR.
2020
Uncorrected proofs of my chapter for the Anthology of European Neo-Latin Literature. Battista Mantovano, Adolescentia 5 (selections): Introduction, text, translation and commentary.
Florilegium, 1982
Ovid composed the Remedia Amoris with the stated intention of curing the lovesickness which he had produced in some readers of his earlier work, the Ars Amatoria. Many of the remedies which he prescribed-hunting, study, travel, farming-turn the lover's attention from his lady. Other remedies which involve love itself as the cure are not essentially different from the causes of the illness-for example, he advised the lovesick to indulge in the amorous act to such an extent that they become physically exhausted and, therefore, are incapable of loving. There are three Old French "Remedies for Lovesickness" 1 which derive from Ovid's Remedia Amoris: Guiart's Art d'amour, a verse paraphrase of Ovid's Ars 2 Amatoria and Remedia Amoris from the end of the Xlllth century; the adaptation, which we will call "Les Règles et les enseignements d'Ovide," in Les Echecs amoureux, an anonymous allegorical romance from the end of the XlVth 3 century; and the Remede d'amours, an anonymous translation from the beginning 4 of the XVth century. There is no detailed study of the "Remedies for Lovesickness" as a tradition. These "Remedies" represent a minor Ovidian tradition which complements the traditional "Arts of Love" in much the same manner that Ovid's Remedia Amoris complements the Ars Amatoria. One is able to trace over the period of a little more than a century that spans from the »first "Remedies" 123
The Seducer's Tongue: Oral and Moral Issues in Medieval Schooltexts (pre-print)
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BMCR, 2020
When a Renaissance poet treats erotic desire realistically-describing the occasional misalignments of human anatomy, say, or expressing skepticism about the beloved's virtue-scholars often suggest that the writer is complicating, problematizing, or transforming Petrarchan love. The great Italian poet functions in such scholarship as "feudalism" or "religion" do in modernization narratives: he names the hazy, idealized, and (though one would never admit it) dull origin from which original, creative individuality departed. Against this tendency, Linda Grant's new book, Latin erotic elegy and the shaping of sixteenth-century English love poetry, insists that Renaissance love poets never were (fully) Petrarchan.
Journal of Roman Studies, 2002
REVIEWS Dryden in order to justify Heywood's humanist 'translation-as-imitation' (io), but his comprehensive study of the cultural, economic, and literary conditions in which Heywood translates Ovid renders such justification unwarranted. A complete translation of the proem and all three books of Ovid's Ars Amatoria then follows, each book supported by a detailed commentary in which S. highlights the relation between Heywood's Ars and the Ovidian text. Appendices include textual notes for each of the books, including discrepancies and editorial emendations, a brief but useful bibliography of primary and secondary sources, and separate indices for introduction and commentaries, and for the translation itself. However, it is somewhat unfortunate that, given Heywood's particular-and, for a classicist of his time, unusual-concern for the accurate spelling and printing of his work-this new edition should be not entirely free from typographical errors (4 'may' for 'many'). In his introduction S. observes that Heywood's 'colleagues in the theaters and courts thought his translation worth reading; literary pirates proved that it was worth stealing; the consumers and publishing underworld of the next generation demonstrated that Loues Schoole was worth reading and stealing-again and again' (29). Colleagues in the field of Classical reception, literary critics of Renaissance literature, and a new generation of readers may well agree.
The purpose of this paper is to draw attention first and foremost to the synesthetic richness of the sensual experience in the interplay of two erotic desires, in Longus' Daphnis and Chloe. But there is more. Sensuality, I will argue, is represented disingenuously in Daphnis and Chloe. Sensation is both obvious and mysterious, spontaneous and maddeningly resistant to an interpretive explanation. Arousal is both an event that automatically occurs in a body, and a hermeneutical conundrum. Falling in love comes as a surprise and can yield to puzzlement, hesitation and inaction. The human desirable body, so it seems, offers a particular challenge to the senses. Both females and males may freeze in a situation of uncertainty about what to do, but even more fundamentally about what exactly they are beginning to feel. Perceptual insecurity complicates the erotic situation. This philosophical sophistication, therefore, thematises a dilemma: is love a natural and self-evident phenomenon, or is it a matter of recondite technique? Which brings to the fore a question of cultural background, namely the hypothesis that two well-known Roman discourses might be part of the textual layering: Ovid’s Ars amatoria and the epistemology of Academic skepticism.
Review of Latin Commentaries on Ovid from the Renaissance, by A. Moss
2000
of Latin Commentaries on Ovid from the Renaissance, by A. Moss. Classical Review 50 (2000): 445-446. THE CLASSICAL REVIEW RENAISSANCE OVID A. Moss: Latin Commentaries on Ovidfrom the Renaissance. Pp. xv + 260, 7 ills. Signal Mountain, TN: Summertown, for the Library of Renaissance Humanism, 1998. Cased, $45. ISBN: 1-893009-02-S. Ovid has been one of the principal beneficiaries in the recent boom in reception studies, as a spate of books in the last fifteen years or so attests. One thinks of L. Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh (New Haven, 1986) and J. Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford, 1993), as well as the essays collected in C. Martindale, Ovid Renewed (Cambridge, 1988), H. Lamarque and A. Baiche, Ovide en France dans la Renaissance (Toulouse, 1981), and-most recently-P. Hardie, A. Barchiesi, and S. Hinds, Ovidian Transformations (Cambridge, 1999). Moss herself has made important contributions both to Ovid and to reception studies generally with Ovid in Renaissance France (London, 1982), Poetry and Fable (Cambridge, 1984), and especially her recent ground-breaking work on Renaissance reading, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford, 1996). In the present work M. follows three famous episodes from the Metamorphoses through the commentaries of eight Renaissance humanists from Raphael Regius (1493) to Thomas Farnaby (1636). The episodes are Apollo and Daphne, Actaeon, and Echo and Narcissus. M.