Ovids Erzählung von Philemon und Baucis steht exemplarisch für die Strategie des Dichters, aus heterogenen Quellen ein neues narratives Ganzes zu formen. Das wird in diesem Beitrag mit Blick auf die ...zeitgenössische soziale Realität, auf die Frage nach Intertextualität (im Rahmen eines weitgespannten Literaturkanons) und Fiktionalität sowie auf die Religionsgeschichte untersucht. Am Ende steht eine ebenfalls paradigmatische Betrachtung der Wege der Rezeption, die Ovids Metamorphosen genommen haben und die die Ovids Polyphonie reduzieren und vereindeutigen.
This essay examines the way that plague discourse allows two writers, Ovid and Mary Shelley, to contemplate the power of a revolution to transform a civic body. The author focuses initially on Ovid’s ...rendering of plague on Aegina in Metamorphoses 7, contextualizing it as a response to the changing significance of pietas as well as to the succession crisis faced by the Principate in the 20’s BCE; she interprets King Aeacus’ narrative of the tragedy he witnesses among his people and their replacement by Myrmidons (ant-people) as a cynical response to the Augustan revolution and its ability to implement lasting change in how Roman subjects interact after the prolonged civil wars of the late Roman Republic. The author then turns to Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, in which a plague eradicates all of known humanity except for a single survivor and eye-witness, Lionel Verney. The essay demonstrates that Shelley taps into Ovid’s cynicism regarding the potential for human recovery after widespread devastation as she and her protagonist consider various alternatives for effective governance in England. Shelley’s exploration of the affective bonds born from familial ties (Ovidian pietas) suggest that such ties pose insurmountable problems to implementing permanent transformation within any human social order.
Apuleius’ literary and philosophical fortune has been considerable since antiquity, mostly through the reception of The Golden Ass. The aim of this collection of essays is to highlight a few major ...aspects of this afterlife, from the High Middle Ages to early Romanticism, in the fields of literature, linguistics and philology, within a wide geographical scope. The volume gathers the proceedings of an international conference held in March 2016 at the Warburg Institute in London, in association with the Institute of Classical Studies. It includes both diachronic overviews and specific case-studies. A first series of papers focuses on The Golden Ass and its historical and geographical diffusion, from High Medieval Europe to early modern Mexico. The oriental connections of the book are also taken into account. The second part of the book examines the textual and visual destiny of Psyche’s story from the Apuleian fabula to allegorical retellings, in poetical or philosophical books and on stage. As the third series of essays indicates, the fortunes of the book led many ancient and early modern writers and translators to use it as a canonical model for reflections about the status of fiction. It also became, mostly around the beginning of the fifteenth century, a major linguistic and stylistic reference for lexicographers and neo-Latin writers : the last papers of the book deal with Renaissance polemics about ‘Apuleianism’ and the role of editors and commentators.
Esta contribución tiene como objetivo fundamental presentar tres manuscritos iluminados de las Metamorfosis de Ovidio, dos conservados en la Biblioteca Nacional de España (BNE) y uno en Dresde, en ...Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden (SLUB). Las iluminaciones de los tres códices presentan una falta de correspondencia aparente con el contenido mitológico del texto y hasta la fecha no se han tenido en cuenta en los estudios sobre las Metamorfosis iluminadas. Su análisis permite poner en relación entre sí de manera clara los tres manuscritos, así como profundizar en el panorama de la miniatura del poema ovidiano durante los últimos siglos de la Edad Media.
This paper reexamines the grove of Orpheus in Ovid, Metamorphoses 10, arguing that it is a space of complex ambiguity as activated and determined by the dual meaning of umbra. It conceptualizes the ...space as an atmospheric doublet of the Underworld, designed to give Orpheus imaginative access to his lost wife Eurydice by providing a second set of shade(s) as an audience for his song. By calling attention to the ways in which Orpheus’ summoning of the grove casts it as a neo-Underworld, this paper seeks to unsettle the grove’s persistent designation as the originary locus amoenus. Altogether, across the levels of narrative, Orpheus and Ovid engage in a receptive repurposing and manipulation of both the idea of literary shade (as inherited and adapted from Virgil) and the trope of the tree catalogue (as familiarised in epic) to create a landscape of profound liminality.
In the Rájec nad Svitavou chateau there is a Flemish cabinet from the period from about 1650-1680 decorated with scenes from Ovid's metamorphoses. The cabinet comes from the former collections of the ...house of Salm. The provenance is attributed to one of the suppliers of the Forchondt family art dealership. This cabinet was the subject of a conservation treatment in 2020. During this intervention, various surveys were completed. One of them was a dendrochronological survey of the larch construction panel found at the bottom of the cabinet. The presence of coniferous wood in the structure, together with the found inscription from 1845, called into question the authenticity of the cabinet. Dendrochronology proved that the larch panel was entirely contemporary and came from the French Maritime Alps. The last datable annual ring from an annual ring series of over 200 years was dated back to 1651. The cabinet case is certainly not the product of nineteenth century repairs in Prague. The result of dendrochronology is clear evidence of the use of imported softwoods in the manufacture of cabinets in Antwerp. The material was probably imported for the manufacturing of ships for the Dutch fleet, and the leftovers were sold on the local market. It can be assumed that more examples like this will appear in the future and should not be surprising.
