Co-Creating a Vernacular Ovid in the Late Middle Ages

• Applicant: Dr. Molly Bronstein
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 551429447

My project situates the anonymous author of the 14th-century Ovide moralisé (OM) as the leader of a medieval "team" translation project; as he begins his translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, he encourages his readers to correct and retranslate his work, and I show how a network of author-translators working in both French and English — including Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, Christine de Pizan, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and William Caxton — respond to this invitation. While studies of medieval textuality often stress competitive relationships between past and present authors, my project reveals that Ovid’s medieval reception is especially propelled by a rising investment in co-creativity and collaborative translation. This project will engage with the following central questions: Are there signs that the above-mentioned authors view themselves and each other as translators as much as authors? Do they show some awareness of the anonymous OM author as a separate creator from Ovid, or do they treat him as an extension of the classical poet? Does Ovid’s name in fact become a byword for the implied “team” of vernacular translators who continually (re)translate Ovid’s work? I investigate these questions through a series of papers focusing on the following case studies: 1) The English reception of the Old French Piramus et Tisbé: The OM author first compiles this lai within his own text, explicitly complimenting his predecessor's translation practice; Chaucer and Gower's retranslations of the same lai carry on this co-creative spirit and evince a clear aesthetic interest in their French predecessors’ translation methods. 2) Christine de Pizan in English: Christine makes extensive use of the OM in her Livre de la Cité des dames and Epistre Othéa. I recuperate Stephen Scrope’s English translation of the Othea, which seems at first to diminish Christine’s role, referring to her as the text’s patron rather than its author; however, Scrope’s reference to the many “doctours” who established the text may in fact acknowledge the team effort underlying Ovid’s reception. 3) I read Chaucer's Book of the Duchess as an example of diachronic team translation, which both translates part of Froissart’s Paradys d’amours and Machaut’s version of the tale of Ceyx and Alcyone (itself already a translation of the OM’s account). 4) Caxton’s Booke of Ovyde — his English translation of the Ovide moralisé en prose — has been relatively neglected by studies in translation history, but I take a view of the text as the clear product of a diachronic process of collaborative translation, as Caxton corrects his work against Chaucer and Gower’s, suggesting his view of his predecessors as translators as much as authors. My work shows how the rise of vernacular authority is intertwined with the often-obscured process of collaborative translation, in contrast with the modern model of the artist as solitary genius.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position