Reframing the "Metamorphoses": The Enabling of Political Allegory in Late Medieval Ovidian Narrative.
- Author/Editor
- Gerber, Amanda J.
- Title
- Reframing the "Metamorphoses": The Enabling of Political Allegory in Late Medieval Ovidian Narrative.
- Published
- Gerber, Amanda J. Reframing the "Metamorphoses": The Enabling of Political Allegory in Late Medieval Ovidian Narrative. Ph.D. Dissertation. The Ohio State University, 2011. viii, 298 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A73.06. Freely accessible at http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1323788507. Abstract accessible at ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.
- Review
- "This study develops a critical method for reading the vernacular frame narratives of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate based on the grammar-school commentaries that taught them classical rhetoric, philology, and history. In the course of developing this method, I answer the following questions: why do the school texts and vernacular works exist in the same format? Why is it that Christian writers appropriate the structuring principles of Ovid's pagan 'Metamorphoses' for their works? Furthermore, what inspired England's obsession with Ovidian narrative structure during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries? Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, to name just a few, participated in this Ovidian vogue--attempting to capture the Roman's sinister and playful voice and, more specifically, to master the frame-narrative device that gave it critical direction. Seeing Ovid's collection of pagan myths as a cohesive and continuous poem, medieval commentators uncovered an argument about abuses of power. Vernacular writers adopted this approach to Ovid, interpreting his work as a model for literary navigation in a historically turbulent period. I hereby alter the assumption that medieval writers mined classical literature merely as sources for their compilations of exempla with which to practice moralizing strategies. Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and their literate contemporaries would have learned in school that the 'Metamorphoses' was a text replete with masterful grammar, syntax, and rhetoric--but also with drama, subversion, and political intrigue" (ii-iii). Focusing in her second chapter on Book 4 of "Confessio Amantis, particularly the tales of Aeneas and Ulysses, Gerber argues that Gower's poem "contains two competing texts: Genius' moral expositions and Gower's literary frame narrative. The former text follows the [moral] allegorical tradition recorded by early medieval Ovidian commentators; the latter text follows the [political] commentary tradition from Orléans and the English prose paraphrases emerging at the end of the Middle Ages, which elucidate and mimic his rhetorical craft. The second text implicitly allows Gower to extend political criticisms from a safe distance." In this way, the CA "provides an early imitation" of the "Metamorphoses": "By removing the motivations for the actions of gods and the ruling class in general, Gower and Ovid similarly criticize those in positions of power for their seemingly arbitrary decisions that are based on selfish purposes" (133-34).
- Date
- 2011
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations