Already in 1881, Ludwig Traube recognized Ovid alongside Virgil and Horace as one of the three most influential classical poets among medieval readers and christened the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as the “age of Ovid” (aetas Ovidiana) because it was during this time that his work was most widely imitated. A worthy addition to this field of research is the latest volume of the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, which collects “the surviving corpus of pseudo-Ovidiana,” that is, poems falsely attributed to Ovid in the Middle Ages. The title of the book, Appendix Ovidiana, evokes the Appendix Vergiliana, the title of the collection of works attributed to Virgil in medieval Europe. Unlike that ancient corpus, however, these thirty-four poems ascribed to Ovid had diverse points of origin in time and did not travel together in medieval manuscripts until the thirteenth century.
This volume is a welcome addition to the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library. The editors have crafted a very helpful introduction that contextualizes each of the poems and explains how medieval scribes related them to Ovid. As a result, the rationale for this collection of pseudo-Ovidiana and its importance for understanding the reception history of Ovid in the Middle Ages are clear. Scholars of medieval Latin poetry will appreciate this collection of poems attributed to Ovid, which brings together in one place many otherwise obscure pieces of late antique and medieval Latin verse that share an association with the famed Roman poet.
Scott G. Bruce
Mediaevistik
