OEF

The aim of the present project is to study the process of acculturation to which the Latin text of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is subjected, from the 14th century onwards, in the French Ovide moralisé. The investigation begins with the manuscripts of the Ovide moralisé, which contain glosses and sometimes elaborate iconographic schemes, and, above all, branch into several very different versions. A study of the French manuscripts, as well as of subsequent prose and printed versions of the text, enables us to see how the Latin text was understood in the French Middle Ages. Through this study it becomes clear that the very feature which was most distinctive of the text in the medieval period – namely the “moralisations” which cause the text to expand into 72000 lines of octosyllablic couplets – sometimes becomes an obstacle to its diffusion. Some manuscripts of the Ovide moralisé omit the moralisations and so become simple translations of the Metamorphoses, but they nonetheless help us to see how the Latin text was assimilated into the Christian Middle Ages. Throughout the process of translation, French scribes could find themselves confronted with a text which had become unfamiliar to them. Today, the manuscripts bear the signs of this lack of understanding, and these sometimes unconscious modifications are especially telling of the transition from one culture to another. Through the collaboration of art historians, lexicologists, and specialists in French and Latin literature, we shall through this project gain an understanding of the life cycle of a text which allowed one of the founding works of western culture to pass from the Classical period to the Middle Ages and then the Renaissance, from Latin to French, from a clerical milieu to a lay readership, from verse to prose, and from manuscripts to printed form. The examination of the language, iconography, glosses and commentaries contained by documents which are still largely unexplored will yield precise studies which will have an importance extending beyond the domain of the Ovide moralisé, for they will shed light on the assimilation of a culture which is at once quite different and yet remarkably similar. Atop this concrete goal there is also a further strategic research objective. Through this bi-national project – which in fact is already European – we shall strive to expand the borders of medieval literary study to encompass a new approach towards the “pre-modern book”, in which specialists in related disciplines can enter into dialogue.