Ulrich’s study intervenes in one of the vexatae quaestiones of contemporary Metamorphoses scholarship: the question of how knowingly, and how ironically, Apuleius’ novel asks to be read. The title — The Shadow of an Ass — signals the book’s interpretive stance, suggesting that what is most significant lies not in plain sight but in the oblique and the occluded. The central thesis is that Apuleius, as a consummate sophistic performer, writes for two audiences at once — the Herculean reader who follows the comic and narrative surface, and the Odyssean reader who detects the philosophical depth beneath. Neither reading cancels the other; both are authorial intentions. In doing so, the study situates itself against the principal hermeneutic division shaping Apuleian scholarship since Winkler’s Auctor & Actor (1985): the opposition between a unitarian, earnestly religious reading — one that takes Lucius’s Isiac conversion in Book 11 as the sincere telos of the work — and a sceptical, ironic reading that sees that conversion as subject to the same comic deflation as the rest of the narrative.
The book comprises an introduction and five chapters. The first, ‘Setting the Stage of Apuleius’, describes readers’ responses in the Second Sophistic age. In the second, ‘Reading as a Choice in the Apuleian Corpus’, U. analyses the invitation in the opening books to choose to read the allegorical beneath the comic. The third, ‘Entranced by the Mirror of Myth’, shows how the aesthetic experience of the divinities constitutes a crossroads choice for Lucius and his readers alike. In ‘Visualizing the Goddess’, the asinine auctor couches his illicit affair in Platonic terms while simultaneously misunderstanding the Platonic procedure. The final chapter, ‘Paradigms of Life’, interprets the Isis Book under the light of the Myth of Er in Plato’s Republic. The Epilogue strengthens and synthesises the conclusions of the individual chapters. The structure reflects the argument’s internal logic; the study treats the Metamorphoses as a whole, though concentrating most heavily on the initial books (1–2) and the final ones (10–11).
The engagement with the critical tradition is comprehensive: Winkler, Harrison, Finkelpearl, Keulen, Graverini, Kenney and Schlam are all present and properly handled. Griffiths’s theologically sympathetic reading of the Isis/religion debate is likewise addressed. The balance between anglophone, German, Italian and French scholarship is broadly satisfactory, and the critical edition used throughout is that of Zimmermann (2012).
The methodological approach combines intertextual, reader-response and philosophical perspectives, applied consistently across the novel’s books. The implied reader U. constructs is ultimately Odyssean, though the study keeps the Herculean reading alive as a legitimate horizon rather than dismissing it as mere naïveté. A recurring question — one this reviewer does not think U. entirely resolves — is whether the ironic reading risks becoming a self-sealing interpretive circle: once committed to the Odyssean position, every ambiguity confirms the approach.
U.’s study generally grounds its readings in close engagement with Apuleius’ notoriously idiosyncratic Latin — the wordplay, archaism, neologism, and so-called Africitas. Particularly effective is the reading of the Prologue and the interpretation of lector scrupolosus (33–9), where the analysis is both philologically precise and interpretively productive. The intertextual comparison between the Isis Book and the Myth of Er is equally compelling, illustrating the philosophical depth operating beneath the comic surface.
The treatment of the Cupid and Psyche episode (Books 4–6) is, by comparison, less satisfying. The episode is handled competently, but the opportunity to test the dual-register thesis against this most contested of embedded narratives — where the allegorical, intertextual, and comic dimensions converge most acutely — is not fully exploited. The reading of the novacula as a phallic object is suggestive but not fully persuasive; the symbolic weight U. places on the object exceeds what the passage will comfortably bear. The Alcibiades/Psyche parallel, though thought-provoking, is asserted rather than demonstrated, and the evidence adduced is insufficient to establish it as a deliberate Apuleian intertextual strategy.
The treatment of Book 11 is inevitably the litmus test of the whole study. U.’s position, consistent with his broader thesis, allows for simultaneous serious and comic registers rather than resolving the tension in either direction, and the argument is persuasive, marshalling both internal and external evidence convincingly. His engagement with the religious-historical dimension — Isis aretalogies, mystery initiation, Apuleius’ philosophical commitments as attested in De deo Socratis and De Platone — is thorough and methodologically cautious.
U.’s most original contribution lies in a synthesis of previously separate debates: the reader-response framework, the philosophical-intertextual dimension and the religious-historical reading of Book 11 are brought into productive dialogue in a way that has not been attempted in quite this form before. Whether this amounts to a substantive advance on Winkler’s foundational ironic reading — now forty years old — or a sophisticated elaboration of a position approaching scholarly consensus, is a question each reader will answer differently.
The Shadow of an Ass is a stimulating contribution to the scholarship on Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, of most immediate interest to specialists in the ancient novel and in Apuleian studies in particular. Whether one finds U.’s double hermeneutic ultimately convincing, or suspects that sustaining both readings simultaneously risks dissolving into critical indecision, his study sharpens the terms of a debate that shows no sign of resolution — which is, perhaps, precisely as Apuleius intended.
