The Moralized Ovid by Pierre Bersuire, edited and translated by Frank T. Coulson and Justin Haynes and published by Harvard University Press in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, represents a monumental contribution to the field of medieval literature and the study of Ovidian reception in the Middle Ages and early modern world.
In a single volume of just over 800pp., Coulson and Haynes meticulously edit and translate the Ovidius Moralizatus, a fourteenth-century text by Pierre Bersuire (ca. 1290-1362), also known as Petrus Berchorius. This edition is significant as it represents the first published English translation and scholarly edition of the Ovidius Moralizatus based on Jodocus Badius’s 1509 printing, the most well-known version and also the most widely-read during the humanist renaissance of the sixteenth century. Until now, the only English translation available was that of Reynolds’s 1971 PhD dissertation.[1] Then, in 2021, Christel Meier and Anna Stenmans published a German translation based on one of the surviving manuscripts (Gotha, Forschungsbibliothek, MS Cod. membr. I 98).[2] Coulson and Hayne’s new edition and first English translation is a welcome addition to this ongoing study of one of the most significant and influential works of the later Middle Ages.
Bersuire was a French Benedictine monk, scholar, and translator who played a key role in the intellectual and literary culture of fourteenth-century Europe. After entering the Benedictine order at the Abbey of Saint-Eloi in Noyon, he spent much of his career in Paris and Avignon, the major intellectual and religious center in France during the Avignon Papacy. For some time he served as librarian to the cardinal and poet Pierre Roger (who became Pope Clement VI) and had access to a vast library of religious and classical texts. His approach to reconciling the teachings of the Bible and Church Fathers with pagan, classical literature owes a great debt to the Augustinian practice of “salvaging the gold of the Egyptians,”[3] to whose authority and model Bersuire directly appeals (p. 7). It also builds upon the work of medieval theologians like Peter Lombard in the twelfth century, and then the explosion of systematic, scholastic theology at the University of Paris in the thirteenth century, represented most notably by the works of St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas Aquinas.
Prior to the Ovidius Moralizatus, Bersuire translated Petrarch’s work on the Roman historian Livy into French for the king of France, John II, and was also known as the author of the Repertorium morale (p.vii), an extensive encyclopedia of moral and allegorical interpretations that systematically compiled readings of Biblical texts and examples from classical literature with a view towards providing a comprehensive guide to moral theology and ethical instruction. He typically arranged entries alphabetically by subject and these covered a wide range of topics related to Christian doctrine, as well as discussions of the virtues and vices. The primary purpose of the work seems to have been to serve as a practical resource for clergy, especially preachers, and in many ways, the project bears a great deal of resemblance to what Bersuire set out to do in the Ovidius Moralizatus, focusing, this time, on reconciling the entire collection of “fables” (fabulae) by the Roman and pagan poet Ovid to Christian doctrine. Of all of his works, the Ovidius Moralizatus exerted the deepest influence over the reception of Ovid’s Metamorphoses — filled with myths about classical gods, their victims of rape, tales of heroes and dangerous women, and spanning, as Ovid put it, from the beginning of the world down to his own times — not only on later medieval and early modern literature, but also on art.
Of course, Bersuire was not the first to undertake a systematic commentary on Ovid, and he benefited greatly from the work of those who preceded him in a lengthy tradition of moralizing and allegorizing Ovid that spans from late antiquity, to the cathedral schools of twelfth-century Europe, and even to the courts, with, for example, the lengthier medieval French Ovide moralisé in verse composed at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Bersuire knew of the work and refers to it (p. 9), noting that it was composed at the insistence of a “Lady Jeanne,” the “late queen of France,” a reference to Jeanne of Burgundy, a possible candidate for patroness of the Old French work, and expresses sadness over not being able to get his hands on a copy: if he had been able to, he adds that he would have been happy to borrow from it and make his work all the easier. (In a later reworking of his draft, Bersuire does manage to consult the medieval French Ovide and does just that.) Another significant departure from the French Ovide is that Bersuire sets aside, for the most part, historical and literal interpretations of Ovid’s myths, favoring moral and allegorical readings that focus, on the one hand, on what moral lessons reader might glean in order to make better moral decisions, and, on the other, how the pagan myth can be reconciled with Christian doctrine.
In their introduction and notes (pp. vii-xviii), Coulson and Haynes succinctly review the history of the Ovidian commentary tradition and situate Bersuire’s contribution within its dynamic, ongoing intellectual tradition and the broader context of Christian medieval Europe. The goal here is not to be exhaustive, but to introduce readers to other resources that will further ground their own reading of Bersuire.
The focus of the volume remains the lengthy text of Bersuire’s Ovidius Moralizatus itself: his treatise On the Forms and Figures of the Gods (pp. 2-121) that frequently circulated as an independent work during the later Middle Ages, followed by his Latin commentary on each of the fifteen books of the Metamorphoses, with facing English translation (pp. 122-741). Then the editor-translators discuss how they established their own Latin text for the volume, basing it on Badius’s printing with consultation of other manuscripts as necessary (pp. 745-50), followed by specific notes to the text that document alternate readings adopted, provide clarification for certain passages, and identify sources that Bersuire himself doesn’t explicitly mention throughout the work (pp. 751-816). As the editor-translators themselves note (p. 745), a critical text based on all surviving manuscripts of the Ovidius Moralizatus has yet to be undertaken and will be much welcome. That said, it is important not to understate the significance of what Coulson and Haynes have achieved with this volume and set out to do. On the one hand, they present a carefully edited, easily consultable text of the Latin printing by Badius; and, on the other, and perhaps most notably, modern readers deterred by the philological and linguistic skills required to engage with Bersuire in Latin, but interested in his deep influence on textual and visual cultures that follow, can now access the facing-page translation. This fills an immense gap in the quest to understand, and make accessible to all readers, the history of the reception of the Classics from antiquity down to our own times. The volume concludes with a bibliography for “further reading” (pp. 817-819) and an index of proper nouns (pp. 821-23).
For those not yet familiar with the Ovidius Moralizatus, this index offers a first glance at Bersuire’s immense project. The names of Achilles, Aeneas, and Ajax figure side-by-side in the list beside Adam, Augustine, and Bernard of Clairvaux. Bersuire appeals to Boethius (whose Consolation of Philosophy, ca. 524 AD was, for centuries, second only to the Bible in terms of the volume of its readers) but also to the Roman Cicero; and he mentions Mary, the Blessed Virgin, as often as the classical goddess Juno. And so on. While no doubt there will be modern readers clamoring for a systematic documentation of all of Bersuire’s sources, as well as the Biblical passages he cites directly (but also indirectly) throughout the text, it would have been unwise and unprofitable to hold back publication until such a detailed and time-consuming project might be completed. One need only remember that Charles Singleton returned to his translation of Dante to draft three commentary volumes lengthier than the text and translation itself,[4] to recognize the weight of such a task, and begin to grasp the deep philological work that has already been undertaken in order to bring the present volume to fruition. The torch has now been passed to new generations of readers, who are invited to carry it forward.
The translation by Coulson and Haynes is faithful to the original Latin and accessible to modern readers. Unlike the medieval French Ovide Moralisé, Bersuire does not attempt to retell, and sometimes expand upon, Ovid’s Latin myths (no doubt because he had no need to translate them for a courtly audience, poised to read Old French but perhaps not the Latin). Coulson and Haynes navigate the intricacies of the moralized and allegorized interpretations of each myth with care, ensuring that Bersuire’s didactic purpose is clearly conveyed, without sacrificing readability. Notes, when deemed necessary, provide critical insights into the allegorical meanings embedded in the text. Coulson and Haynes’s expertise in medieval Latin and their familiarity with the textual tradition of Ovid are evident throughout the book: it is an invaluable resource for scholars of medieval literature, classical reception, intellectual history, and art history.
In addition to these scholarly merits, Coulson and Haynes’s Ovidius Moralizatus opens new avenues for understanding how the later medieval and early modern readers who were Christians received classical myths and reframed them in light of moral and didactic lessons. By making Bersuire accessible to twenty-first century scholars and students, they invite a broader audience to engage not only with the process of cultural and textual adaptation, but also with the truly interdisciplinary nature of Bersuire’s moralizing commentary, that draws on over one thousand years of philosophy, theology, literature, and commentaries to distill the meaning he believed was hidden beneath the surface of classical myths and that might serve as moral examples (and counterexamples) for his contemporary and future readers.
Overall, Coulson and Hayne’s work is a remarkable achievement in editing and translation. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the intersections of classical and medieval literature, medieval thought, theology, art history, and the history of textual transmission. The authors and Harvard University Press are to be commended for undertaking such a significant philological project that will, without doubt, shape and impact the field for the foreseeable future, opening up new insight into the age-old question of, What does Athens (or in this case, Rome) have to do with Jerusalem?
Notes
[1] Reynolds, William D. “The Ovidius moralizatus of Petrus Berchorius: An Introduction and Translation.” PhD diss., University of Illinois, 1971.
[2] Meier, Christel, with Anna Stenmans, eds. and trans. Der “Ovidius moralizatus”: Ausgabe, Übersetzung, Kommentar. Vol. 2 of Petrus Berchorius und der antike Mythos im 14. Jahrhundert, edited by Dieter Blume and Christel Meier. Berlin, 2021.
[3] Described by St. Augustine in On Christian Doctrine, ch. 40.
[4] Charles Singleton, trans. The Divine Comedy. Translated with a Commentary. 6 vols. Princeton, 1970-75.