The Lives of Ovid in Seventeenth-Century French Culture. Helena Taylor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. ix+195.

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewThe Lives of Ovid in Seventeenth-Century French Culture. Helena Taylor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. ix+195.Paul WhitePaul WhiteUniversity of Leeds Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe early modern reception of Ovid has proved a most fertile territory for scholars in recent years. Whereas the (by now) standard mode of approach is via instances of reception of Ovid’s poetic works themselves, the contribution of Taylor’s study is to shift attention toward “lives of Ovid” and their uses. This is not a mere narrowing of focus onto that subset of texts in the receiving culture that might conveniently be labeled “biographical”; rather, Taylor tackles the larger question of what Ovid meant for readers of this period and how writers used Ovid as a key reference point as they thought through aesthetic, social, and moral problems.The French seventeenth century proves to be an excellent testing ground for this kind of approach. The Ovid that emerges from Taylor’s discussion is one very finely attuned to the preoccupations of writers negotiating wider cultural shifts, tensions, and confrontations, such as the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, the emergence of the galant aesthetic, and the shift to a female dominated literary culture. Ovid’s love poetry and his exile poems naturally get the most attention in this study: galanterie and exile are the two poles around which seventeenth-century uses of Ovid gravitate.Taylor’s study ranges widely over genres beyond life writing, taking in translations and their various paratexts (dedications, prefaces, liminary poems), novels, poetry, letters, and whatever genre Bayle’s Dictionnaire belongs to. Accordingly, the discussion often digresses from its stated focus on lives of Ovid into discussion of views about the character of his poetry and matters of style. Since lives of Ovid are so bound up with readings of his work, this is not to be judged a shortcoming of the book; rather, Taylor uses the focus on lives as a way back into literary questions, giving fresh perspectives on familiar problems. Much of the discussion hinges on the vexed question of the relation between author and poetic persona (the locus classicus is Tristia 2.353–58) and associated critical debate. Taylor shows that seventeenth-century authors found Ovid—who was sensitive to these issues, but also playfully elusive about them—useful to explore such questions on their own terms.The first chapter, which focuses on life writing proper, gives an efficient overview of the ancient sources and the medieval and humanist vitae, which serves as background to the main discussion of the seventeenth-century vies. It begins, naturally, with Ovid’s own life of Ovid, Tristia 4.10. Of all classical poets, Ovid was an unusually “autobiographical” one (the scare quotes are de rigueur). As Taylor goes on to show, Ovid’s self-consciouness as the poet of his own life and the metaliterary reflections in his work made him particularly amenable to later appropriations by writers reflecting on their own position with literary tradition and society.In chapter 2, “Translating Ovid,” Taylor considers the various ways that Ovid was used in translations and paratexts throughout three phases of seventeenth-century translation practice—the 1620s, the midcentury burlesque versions, and the galant versions of the last third of the century—to shape and refine ideas of French literary culture and to engage in debates. In particular, the burlesque, often deployed to critique ancient authority, functions differently in the case of the “already burlesque” Ovid. This, along with the perceived amenability of Ovid to the “female-orientated polite aesthetic” (69) associated with galanterie, accounts in part for the Modernes’ particular fondness for Ovid.Chapter 3, “Ovid in Fiction,” shows how female writers, in making Ovid a character in their fictions, used Ovid’s story to think about the dangers of writing and publication, but also adopted metaliterary strategies from Ovid’s own poetry to articulate complex reflections on the confrontations of writing and power. The main focus here is the role of Ovid’s story in shaping the genre of the histoire galante, the key text being Mme de Villedieu’s six-volume novel Ovide, ou les exilez de la cour d’Auguste (1672–78). Writers like Villedieu found Ovid particularly “congenial to the contemporary sociable literary climate” (79), in part because of his playful explorations of ideas about reading and interpretation. The appropriation of Ovid by female Modernes is viewed here as an intervention “in the restricted and male-dominated domain of classical reception” (91).Chapter 4, which is characterized by subtle and persuasive close readings of texts, focuses on uses of Ovid’s exile persona and its perspectives on poetry by two very different exiled writers, Théophile de Viau and Bussy-Rabutin. Ovid, the poet of exile par excellence, provided these authors with ways to complicate the connection between aesthetics and ethics and to reassert the power of literature. Théophile’s trial and condemnation rested on a wilful conflation of poetic persona and self. (As figures like Théodore de Bèze had discovered in the previous century, religious and political polemicists are necessarily unsubtle readers of imaginative literature.) Ovid provided a model to problematize such easy identifications.The final chapter, on Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (first ed., 1697), is called “Ovid and Historiography,” although much of this chapter’s focus is more literary than historiographical, concentrating on problems of interpretation in poetry. Taylor gives us an attentive and nuanced reading of Bayle that is thoroughly engaged with recent scholarship and with wider methodological debates in intellectual history. Throughout the various additions and changes he made to successive editions of the Dictionnaire, Bayle was constantly reflecting on and complicating his own processes of thinking and interpretation. In wrestling with the problem of determining the truth about Ovid’s exile, Bayle used Ovid as a lens through which to examine hermeneutic and epistemological problems.English translations of all French and Latin quotations are supplied. Translations from the French are mostly accurate (with one exception, on page 102, where “sureté” must mean a “surety or bond,” and not “certainty”). Latin terms are not always carefully transcribed (e.g., “praeterio” for “praeteritio” [25]; “coecendis” and “martandis” for “coercendis” and “maritandis” [26]; “Augustam” for “Augustum” [50]).Taylor expertise as a dix-septiémiste shows in her insightful and nuanced discussions of issues around galanterie and the Modernes. But this rich and rewarding book deserves, and will no doubt find, a much wider readership beyond the discipline of French studies. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 116, Number 2November 2018 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/698951HistoryPublished online July 02, 2018 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.