WHITE, Paul, Renaissance Postscripts. Responding to Ovid's Heroides in Sixteenth-Century France, Columbusm Ohio State Univesity Press, 2009, 274 p.
ISBN 978-0-8142-0744-4
RÉSUMÉ
Ovid's Heroides, a collection consisting mainly of poeticlove letters sent by mythological heroines to their absent lovers, helda particular fascination for Renaissance readers. To understand theirresponses to these letters, we must ask exactly how and in whatcontexts those readers first encountered them: were they read in Latinor in the vernacular; as source texts for the learning of grammar andhistory or as love poetry; as epistolary and rhetorical models or asmoral examples?
Renaissance Postscripts: Responding to Ovid's Heroides in Sixteenth-Century France by Paul White offers an account of the wide variety of responses to the Heroideswithin the realm of humanist education, in the works of both Latincommentators and French translators, and as an example of a particularmode of imitation. The author examines how humanists shaped thediscourse of Ovid's heroines and heroes to pedagogical ends andanalyzes even the woodcuts that illustrated various editions. Thisstudy traces comparative readings of French translations through aperiod noted for important shifts in attitudes to the text and topoetic translation in general and offers an important history of the“reply epistle”—a mode of imitation attempted both in Latin and thevernacular. Renaissance Postscripts shows that while the Heroideswas a versatile text that could serve a wide range of pedagogical andliterary purposes, it was also a text that resisted the attempts of itsinterpreters to have the final word.
BIOGRAPHIE
Paul White is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of French, University of Cambridge.