Ovidian echoes are ubiquitous in the literature and visual culture of seventeenth-century France. The innumerable different forms of the poet's ‘influence’ have been exhaustively analysed: from studies focusing on the fortunes of one myth in the Metamorphoses, on one French author or one genre of literature, through to the garden ornaments at Versailles and the elaborate iconographic fantasy of the Sun King. T.’s monograph breaks new ground in taking a different starting-point: the interpretations of Ovid's life, and in particular the uses made of it in literary controversies and through authors’ self-identification with Ovid's own apparent portrayal of his personality and experiences.
The results of this approach are impressive and often unexpected. Earlier studies have, inevitably, concentrated principally on the Metamorphoses, supplemented by the love letters of the Heroides and, in a galant context, the Amores and Ars amatoria. T., on the other hand, is concerned above all with the contrasting groups of works in which the poet's self-presentation is most prominent: the Amores and Ars amatoria on the one hand, and on the other the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto.
The book opens with an account of the long history of Ovidian biography and, especially, its evolution over the course of the seventeenth century, from the scholarly tradition of the Latin vitae to the end-of-century preference for a vie galante aimed at a far less specialised readership. The second chapter is concerned with translations, including particularly the prefatory material through which the translators situate their work in relation to current literary controversies. This is full of diversity and interest. Early in the century we find Ovid used as a weapon in the intense culture wars between France and Italy. With a fine example of cultural appropriation, translators depict Ovid as now, through their work, exiled to a welcoming France from his unworthy homeland; Rome is now barbaric, the barbarous Getic people become the civilised French, and Louis XIII outshines the deplorable Augustus. The central decades of the century saw the vogue for burlesque parody of the great canonical works of antiquity. Ovid is a gift for sending-up like this, and there were two separate burlesque versions each of the Metamorphoses and the Ars amatoria. The crucial difference, however, between these and similar treatments of Virgil is that the poets did not set out to ridicule and diminish their author, but rather claimed him as one of their own, a poet who himself loved parody and subversion: in a digression on contemporary engraved portraits of Ovid, T. notes how in the frontispiece to Dassoucy's L'Ovide en belle humeur (itself a revealing title) a smiling Ovid is depicted in seventeenth-century harlequinesque costume, looking into a mirror held by Dassoucy and seeing, not a caricature, but an accurate representation of his own face. Burlesque was perceived as a uniquely ‘modern’ genre, by its very nature conveying the superiority of modern poets over the ancients; but Ovid is, specifically, welcomed among the moderns. This complex chapter ends with a consideration of the later seventeenth-century translations and their prefatory vies, which are now far from the scholarly vitae: a galant Ovid is portrayed and translated in easily-assimilable contemporary terms, to appeal to a new readership, less learned, more worldly, notably more female and above all moderne.
These themes are pursued in the third chapter, ‘Ovid in Fiction’. Just as male translators and authors in the second half of the century conceived of Ovid as being particularly attractive to their idea of a female readership, so also the increasingly numerous and successful female writers featured him in their works, and used the ambiguities of his life and his representations of women to express their own concerns as women writers and those of their predominantly female readership. The chapter considers works by Madeleine de Scudéry, Antoinette Deshoulières and Marie-Jeanne L'Héritier before focusing particularly on Madame de Villedieu (Marie-Catherine Desjardins) and Anne de La Roche-Guilhen. Their highly fictionalised reimaginings of both Ovid's person and his life, particularly his exile, in the context of the modern genre of the histoire galante open up multiple possibilities for commentary and criticism of contemporary concerns, aesthetic, ethical and even political.
With this chapter the book moves from the amatory works to the poems of exile. It is followed, in ‘The Exile Writes Back’, by a comparative study of the brilliant libertin poet Théophile de Viau and the aristocratic soldier and courtier Bussy-Rabutin, an accomplished prose stylist and self-consciously judicious literary critic: two figures from different halves of the century who have little in common save, crucially, the experience of exile caused, in each case, by works perceived as licentious and offensive to the powerful, and their attempts to rehabilitate themselves through their writing. The Ovidian parallels are obvious and fully exploited by the exiles and their friends, while taking care to distinguish their own monarchs from the cruelty and vindictiveness generally attributed to Augustus. It is difficult not to like and admire the persona that Théophile creates, and equally difficult to warm to Bussy-Rabutin's combination of arrogance, vanity and servile fawning to Louis XIV. It is a challenge to combine the two into one successful chapter; yet T.’s analysis of the complexities of these writers’ positions and the strategies they employed is genuinely subtle and illuminating.
The final view of Ovid, in ‘Ovid and Historiography’, is Pierre Bayle's bracingly intelligent and multi-layered article in his Dictionnaire. In a stimulating and well-supported discussion, T. traces the evolution of the article's evaluation of Ovid's life through the early editions. In his sharp awareness of the limitations and unreliability of all sources, including (perhaps especially) Ovid's own writings, the extreme fallibility of speculation, and yet the need to construct a narrative, this article is seen as a microcosm of one of the great themes of the Dictionnaire: both the limitations of historiography and at the same time the necessity for serious historical enquiry.
This monograph is wide in its scope and well written. T. guides the reader securely through the frequently paradoxical role that the figure of Ovid played in such major cultural developments as the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, the increasingly important presence of female authors and readers, and the evolution of the principles of historiography. All quotations in French and Latin are provided with translations, which are well handled (I noticed only a few slips).
There are, inevitably, a few minor reservations. The book could have done with a little more ‘de-thesifying’: while some of the accounts of recent critical debates are helpful, as in the case of Bayle, for many readers the ubiquitous name-checking in the text of critics of the past 40 years will often add little to the flow of the argument, and – especially when recounting squabbles over details of interpretation – could better have been relegated to the footnotes. As well as the usual sprinkling of typos, six lines of the text on p. 17 are repeated word for word on p. 45. A number of other slips should also be noted when they involve French writers: Pierre-Daniel Huet, later Bishop of Avranches, was never a Jesuit (p. 37), and neither was Michel de Marolles, abbé de Villeloin (p. 39); Nicolas Perrot d'Ablancourt is called Pierre and indexed as Pierre Ablancourt; while Jean de Lingendes is consistently called Delingendes and indexed under ‘D’. Théophile de Viau is discussed at length, but is absent from the bibliography of primary sources (he strangely appears under Guido Saba, his editor, among the critical works).
These, though, are small complaints. In its contribution to seventeenth-century French studies, this scholarly monograph opens up new and stimulating perspectives; in terms of Ovidian scholarship, it offers a rewarding illustration of the pervasive, creative and so often surprising presence in early modern culture of this most famously polysemic of poets.
