In this pluralistic system of interpretation, we have the textual attitude of Neoplatonist
mythography, where the text is seen as polyvalent, that is, capable of yielding up many
meanings. The popularity of the Ovide moralisé lies largely in the poet’s success in
adapting the critical system of moral mythography to vernacular literary interests in
Ovid’s stories. The poem at once provides a comprehensive rendering of Ovidian lore
and elaborates a moral justification for such pagan fictions.
Rita Copeland
[See also: BERSUIRE, PIERRE; LEFÈVRE, RAOUL; OVID, INFLUENCE OF;
OVIDIAN TALES]
de Boer, Cornelius, ed. Ovide moralisé. 5 vols. Amsterdam: Koninklijke Akademie van
Wetenschappen, 1915–38.
Demats, Paule. Fabula: trois études de mythographie antique et médiévale. Geneva: Droz, 1973.
Engels, Joseph. Études sur l’Ovide moralisé. Groningen: Wolters, 1945.
Panofsky, Erwin. Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art. New York: Harper and Row, 1969.
Tuve, Rosemond. Allegorical Imagery: Some Mediaeval Books and Their Posterity. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1966.
OVIDIAN TALES
. Throughout the Middle Ages, Ovid was read, glossed, imitated, and translated. It is not
surprising that the 12th century, the aetas Ovidiana, should have produced, among other
works based on Ovid, French versions of some of his Metamorphoses. Those that
survive, all from the second half of the century, are Piramus et Tisbé, Narcisse, and
Philomena, corresponding, respectively, to Metamorphoses 4.55–166, 3.339–512, and
6.426–74; in addition, a fragment of some 120 lines of a hitherto unknown 13th-century
rival version of Piramus has recently been published. Like the related Romances of
Antiquity, these brief stories tend to elaborate the feelings of the characters in long lyric
and dramatic monologues and dialogues, based on Ovidian writings on love but having
no equivalent in the immediate source. They tend to reduce the role of the pagan gods
and (except for Philomena) the idea of metamorphosis. All are written in couplets of
octosyllabic lines, though Piramus has some vers libres in the added monologues.
Piramus, which expands Ovid’s 112 hexameters into some 920 lines as published, is
preserved in three independent manuscripts as well as in the influential early 14th-century
compilation Ovide moralisé, whose author used the poem instead of translating the
metamorphosis himself. (Via a later prose version of the Ovide moralisé, the poem
indirectly influenced several authors, including Shakespeare and Théophile de Viau.)
Freely and with fine lyrical monologues and dialogues, Piramus retells the story of the
young Babylonian lovers separated by their parents and imprisoned in neighboring
houses; through a chink in the wall they converse and agree to meet by Ninus’s tomb
under a mulberry tree; Tisbé arrives first and is frightened away by a lion, which bloodies
a veil she lets fall; Piramus draws the wrong conclusion, stabs himself, and dies in the
arms of Tisbé, who commits suicide with the same sword. Ovid’s metamorphosis of the
mulberries’ color is omitted. The French poem, unlike Ovid, motivates the separation of
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