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Chaucer and the Ovide Moralisé—A Further Study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Sanford Brown Meech*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan

Extract

The indebtedness of Chaucer's Legend of Philomela to the Ovide Moralisé for details not to be found in the Metamorphoses was established more than a decade ago by Professor Lowes. Observing, further, in the Legend of Ariadne and in the short account of her abandonment by Theseus in the Hous of Fame (405–426) the strong resemblances to Machaut's résumé of Theseus' “fals jape” in the Jugement dou Roy de Navarre, Lowes suggested that these likenesses might also be due, wholly or in part, to a common use of Machaut's favorite source, the Ovide Moralisé, although as the pertinent part of the text of the Ovide Moralisé was still unpublished, he was unable to verify his conjecture. Recently Professor Shannon, without examining the history of Ariadne in the French version of the Metamorphoses, has somewhat rashly rejected Professor Lowes's theory, and declared that Boccaccio's De Genealogia Deorum is the only source aside from Ovid himself which Chaucer used for his stories of the heroine. In the course of a general examination of the influence upon Chaucer of the Ovide Moralisé —made upon de Boer's edition and upon a manuscript of the complete text—I have found that Lowes's hypothesis is sound, while the instances of the impress of Boccaccio's mythology cited by Shannon appear uniformly weak.

Information

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1931

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