What Is the Ovide Moralisé?

Visitors to the Villa Borghese in Rome are charmed every year by Bernini’s statue of Apollo and Daphne. For good cause: the statue is beautiful. The characters spring to life, almost escaping from the marble – the god pursuing the nymph; the nymph beginning her transformation into a laurel tree. Few modern visitors glance at the Latin inscription on the base, but for those who do, their experience of the statue is transformed, for the transcription places the myth within a moral framework: “Those who love to pursue fleeting forms of pleasure, in the end find only leaves and bitter berries in their hands.” This was a feature of the Western tradition of reading Ovid for over a thousand years, and nowhere do we see it more clearly than in the Ovide moralisé.

The Ovide moralisé (Moralized Ovid, or OM for short) is a fourteenthcentury French retelling of the Metamorphoses, a collection of Greco-Roman myths by the Latin poet Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso, 43bc–17ad). Ovid’s poem was about “forms changed into new bodies” (1.1–2). Some of these are famous even now: Echo, the nymph who became a mere voice after pining away for Narcissus, a beautiful young man who fell in love with his own reflection and dwindled into a flower; Arachne, the proud weaver who became a spider; Pygmalion, whose statue of a woman came to life. The OM metamorphosized the Metamorphoses, turning about 12,000 lines of Latin – all fifteen books of Ovid’s poem – into some 72,000 lines of French.

Unlike Ovid’s poem, the OM is an explicitly Christian work, and Ovid’s stories are understood to be communicating Christian truth. The way the OM goes about demonstrating this makes it a fascinating case study in medieval thinking. It opens a unique window onto the culture, religion, politics, and intellectual climate of France, and, by extension, Western Europe, c.1320. The broad issue that it exemplifies, in terms of the history of ideas, is how premodern Europe dealt with the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome.

Christianity, as a monotheistic religion founded on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, might have been inclined to jettison or condemn everything that came before it. This issue was debated from the formative period of the early church. For example: