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The Bedraggled Cupid: Ovidian Satire in ‘Carmina Burana’ 105

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2016

Alison Goddard Elliott*
Affiliation:
Brown University

Extract

Ovid's exceptional popularity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is past dispute; the exact nature of his influence, however, is somewhat less clear. The medieval student first read Ovid early in his career at cathedral schools such as Orléans and Chartres, where his teacher taught him that the classical poets were wise and learned authorities who could offer a Christian much profitable instruction (in Ovid's case, this interpretation involved a considerable distortion, to which we shall return). The student also learned that imitating the Roman authors was a safe and respectable course to follow. As far as Ovid is concerned, medieval poets learned their lessons well. Whether writing in classical, quantitative meters or in medieval, accentual ones, the poets, when they turn to love, sing in the Ovidian vein.

Type
Miscellany
Copyright
Copyright © Fordham University Press 

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References

1 I thank Traditio's reader, Winthrop Wetherbee, for several helpful suggestions.Google Scholar

2 The most recent survey is McGregor, James H., ‘Ovid at School: From the Ninth to the Fifteenth Century,’ Classical Folia 32 (1978) 2951.Google Scholar

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22 For witty use of statues of Venus (Aphrodite) see the series of epigrams in the Greek Anthology 16.159f.Google Scholar

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51 Bowden, Betsy, ‘The Art of Courtly Copulation,’ Medievalia et Humanistica 9 (1979) 6785.Google Scholar

52 The text is in Oulmont, Charles, Les Débats du clerc et du chevalier (Paris 1911); also Meyer, W., Nachrichten von der Königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, Philologisch-historische Klasse (1914) 1–19. The poem is squarely in the Ovidian tradition; at the ‘trial’ the Gospel according to Ovid, the Ars Amatoria, is read.Google Scholar

53 Shedd, Gordon M., ‘Amor Dethroned: The Ovidian Tradition in Courtly Love Poetry’ (Diss. Pennsylvania State University 1965) 48.Google Scholar

54 One of the most outspoken of Ovid's critics was Guillaume de St. Thierry, whose censure of Ovid's followers in De natura et dignitate amoris (PL 184.379) is so harsh its editor has subtitled the work ‘Anti-Nasonem.’ Conrad, , Dialogus super auctores (above, n. 34) 114. Bacon, Roger, Opus tertium cap. 15, in Opera quaedam hactenus inedita, ed. Brewer, W. S. (London, 1859) I 54. Google Scholar