There is a fair likelihood that the most widely read work of a late medieval English author was Robert Holcot’s extensive Super Sapientiam Salomonis. More than 170 copies of the work, the standard late medieval commentary on the text, have been identified. But Holcot – and the implications of his work – have remained strangely uninvstigated, since Beryl Smalley first drew him to attention some sixty years ago. (And neither Judson Allen’s study of Holcot’s colleague John Ridewall nor a recent Oxford University Press volume have done much except repeat Smalley’s contentions.) Smalley was a great scholar of Christian exegesis, but her comments on Holcot (and others of her ’classicising friars’, like Ridewall) were handicapped by her very strengths; she could only identify his behaviour, an interest in classical culture the display of which she found tedious, as exegetically divergent. The essay, beyond a close reading of Holcot’s programmatic prologue, examines one of his more diverting ’authorities’, the pseudo-Ovidian De vetula, and explores some reasons for Holcot’s fascination.

Chapter 1, ‘Medieval Ovids’, opens the discussion with perhaps the most prolific and the most devious author of autofiction in ancient literature: the poet Ovid. Ovid had no surviving ancient tradition of Lives, but his texts themselves provided an ideal ground for the creation of biofictional narratives. Encoding within them a life-story that deliberately teeters between fiction and reality, Ovid’s texts invited a life-centred reception that illustrates some of the essential dynamics of biofictional reading. With no ancient Life available to them, medieval writers willingly took up Ovid’s implicit invitation to produce biofictional supplements to his texts, telling and retelling stories about the poet’s imaginary lives: from the accessus or ‘introduction’ that typically prefaced texts of ancient authors, often inscribed as a paratext to the poet’s works in the manuscripts themselves, to the thirteenth-century pseudepigraphal De vetula, a 2400-line poem presented as Ovid’s autobiography from exile discovered in the poet’s recently excavated tomb. Seemingly situated on the margins of medieval culture, these experiments in life-writing show that biofictional engagement with Ovid functioned as a dynamic and creative site of reading texts and writing Lives in the period, foregrounding the case for biofiction as a mode of textual engagement in reception.