Reading Myth

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This book explores the appropriation and transformation of classical mythology by French culture from the mid-twelfth century to about 1430. Each of the five chapters focuses on a specific moment in this process and asks: What were the purposes of transforming classical myth? Which techniques did poets use to integrate classical subject matter into their own texts? Was a special interpretive tradition created for vernacular texts? In Chapter 1, the author shows how Latin epic texts were reoriented for political purposes in the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman realm, gaining new depth by the addition of Ovidian elements that evoked threats of a disorder different from the struggles of classical epic. Chapter 2 analyzes the complex use of myth in the thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose , which offers new conjunctions and interpretations of myths related to language, artistic expression, and sexuality. Chapter 3 focuses on the interpretive techniques and vocabulary of the fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé , such as "allegory," "fable," and istoire , arguing that the Christianization of the Metamorphoses created a "new Ovid" in the form of a fourteenth-century friar. Chapter 4 reveals that

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