Abstract
In the English literature of the Middle Ages, Medea is often deprived of the opportunity to demonstrate her considerable and alarming powers to the full. In Book 5 of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, the figure of Amans assures the Confessor, ‘I have herde it ofte seie / Hou Jason tok the flees aweie / Fro Colchos’ (5.4231–3).1 Medea’s crucial role is unmentioned here, and although earlier in the poem Gower has described her magic, and the crimes she was willing to commit for Jason, it is not her ability or her ruthlessness but her unrequited love for Jason that is stressed as her story closes, in terms which clearly disempower Medea and give Jason the upper hand. Such a description is typical of the medieval English approach to Medea, which on the whole sought to elide or undercut her power wherever possible, despite medieval authors’ knowledge of powerful classical and continental Medeas. English authors such as Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate and Caxton gleaned their knowledge of Medea not only from Ovid but also from continental sources, such as Guido delle Colonne’s Historia Destructionis Troiae, Boccaccio’s De Claris Mulieribus and De Genealogia Deorum Gentilium Libri and Raoul Lefèvre’s Histoire de Jason, as well as from late antique and medieval mythographies and commentaries.2 What is most noticeable, however, is the extent to which these English authors attempt to contain Medea’s power, by either ignoring it altogether or describing it in highly circumscribed ways.
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Notes
John Gower, The English Works, The Complete Works, ed. G. C. Macaulay, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899–1902).
Kathryn L. McKinley notes that manuscripts of the Metamorphoses enjoyed much wider circulation in fifteenth-century England than did Ovid’s other works: see Reading the Ovidian Heroine: ‘Metamorphoses’ Commentaries 1100–1618 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), pp. 108–9. On use of the Heroides (and commentaries on the poems) in medieval education, see Ralph J. Hexter, Ovid and Medieval Schooling: Studies in Medieval School Commentaries on Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, Epistulae ex Ponto, and Epistulae Heroidum (Munich: Arbeo-Gesellschaft, 1986), pp. 1–13 and Part 3.
While Benoît refers to Dares in his recounting of Jason and Medea’s story, the sixth-century work does not actually mention her. For the medieval enthusiasm for citing Dares (whether or not he had actually been consulted), and another work that claimed to be an eyewitness account of the war, by Dictys of Crete, see A. J. Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982), pp. 23–4. For Dares’ text, see Dictys of Crete and Dares the Phrygian, The Trojan War, trans. and ed. R. M. Frazer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966).
Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Le Roman de Troie, vol. 1, ed. L. Constans, 6 vols (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1904–12). Translations my own.
Barbara Nolan, Chaucer and the Tradition of the ‘Roman Antique’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 33–5.
Ruth Morse, The Medieval Medea (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996), p. 88.
Kathleen Chesney has shown that Guido’s source was probably a particular prose redaction of Benoît’s poem, written in southern Europe. See Morse, Medieval Medea, p. 92, and Kathleen Chesney. See Morse, Medieval Medea, p. 92, and Kathleen Chesney, ‘A Neglected Prose Version of the Roman de Troie’, Medium Aevum 11 (1942), pp. 46–67.
Guido de Columnis (Guido delle Colonne), Historia Destructionis Troiae, ed. Nathaniel Edward Griffin (Cambridge, Mass.: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1936).
Translations are from Guido delle Colonne, Historia Destructionis Troiae, trans. and ed. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974).
Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G. P. Goold, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1916, rev. 1977). All quotations from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and all modern translations, are from this edition.
Quotations from the Vatican Mythographers are from Scriptores Rerum Mythicarum Latini Tres Romae Nuper Reperti, ed. G. H. Bode (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1968; repr. 1996). Translations are my own.
Giovanni di Garlandia (John of Garland), Integumenta Ovidii: Poemetto Inedito del Secolo XIII, ed. Fausto Ghisalberti (Messina: Giuseppe Principato, 1933). Translations of John of Garland are my own.
See Morse, Medieval Medea, pp. 135–40, and also Joel N. Feimer, ‘Medea in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Ovide moralisé: Translation as Transmission’, Florilegium 8 (1986), pp. 40–55, for further discussion of the poem’s treatment of Medea.
Ovide moralisé en prose, texte du quinziè me siè cle, ed. C de Boer (Amsterdam: North-Holland Pub. Co., 1954). Translations my own. For further summaries of medieval commentaries on and interpretations of Ovid, see Don Cameron Allen, Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), ch. 7,
and Robert Earl Kaske, Arthur Groos and Michael W. Twomey (eds), Medieval Christian Literary Imagery: A Guide to Interpretation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), pp. 122–6.
Pierre Bersuire, Metamorphosis Ovidiana moraliter … explanata: Paris, 1509, ed. Stephen Orgel (New York: Garland, 1979). Translation my own.
Thomas Elyot, Bibliotheca Eliotae, Eliotis Librarie (London: 1542; STC (2nd edn) 76595), Eiiiv. The definition remains unchanged in subsequent versions, revised by Thomas Cooper. E.g., see Bibliotheca Eliotae: Eliotes diction-arie by Thomas Cooper the third tyme corrected (London: 1559), STC (2nd edn) 7663. The influence of continental ‘manuals’ of mythology in the English Renaissance is discussed briefly by Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art, trans. Barbara F. Sessions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953, repr. 1972), pp. 312–15,
and more extensively in DeWitt T. Starnes and Ernest William Talbert, Classical Myth and Legend in Renaissance Dictionaries: A Study of Renaissance Dictionaries in Relation to the Classical Learning of Contemporary English Writers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955).
See Thomas Blount, Glossographia (London: 1656; Wing (2nd edn) B3334), B23r, who quotes Thomas Browne’s hugely popular reference work that aimed to debunk a wide range of myths and superstitions, Pseudodoxia epidemica (London: 1646; Wing B5159), pp. 22–3. See also Palaephatus, On Unbelievable Tales, trans. and ed. Jacob Stern, with notes and Greek text from the 1902 B. G. Teubner edition (Wauconda, Ill.: Bolchazy-Carducci, 1996), pp. 75–6.
On this literary tradition, see Glenda McLeod, Virtue and Venom: Catalogs of Women from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991). She briefly discusses Medea as an exemplum in works by Boccaccio, Christine de Pizan, Chaucer and the twelfth-century author Walter Map, whose ‘Dissuasion to Rufinus, that he should not take a Wife’, part of De Nugis Curialium, playfully suggests that a man should seek out Ovid’s lost tragedy Medea, if he wants to understand more about women’s malign capabilities.
Giovanni Boccaccio, Famous Women, trans. Virginia Brown (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 75–9. Medea’s reunion with Jason, also recounted by Boccaccio in De Genealogia Deorum Gentilium Libri, is described by the second-century mythographer Apollodorus, in The Library of Greek Mythology, and by the Roman historian Justin, in The Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus.
Janet Cowen, ‘Women as Exempla in Fifteenth-Century Verse of the Chaucerian Tradition’, in Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (eds), Chaucer and Fifteenth-Century Poetry (London: Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, King’s College London: 1991), pp. 51–65 (56).
Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York: Persea, 1998).
The ‘Gest Hystoriale’ of the Destruction of Troy, ed. George A. Panton and David Donaldson, Early English Text Society OS 39, 56 (London: Trübner and Co., 1869–74). The poem is usually dated to the late fourteenth century. See McKay Sundwall, ‘The Destruction of Troy, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, and Lydgate’s Troy Book’, RES, New Series 26.103 (1975), pp. 313–17;
and James Simpson, ‘The Other Book of Troy: Guido delle Colonne’s Historia Destructionis Troiae in Fourteenth-and Fifteenth-Century England’, Speculum 73.2 (1998), pp. 397–423;
on its author see Thorlac Turville-Petre, ‘The Author of the Destruction of Troy’, Medium Aevum 57 (1988), pp. 264–8;
and Edward Wilson, ‘John Clerk, Author of The Destruction of Troy’, Notes and Queries 37.4 (1990), pp. 391–6. Panton and Donaldson identify ‘Eydos’ as Heroides 12 (p. 467n.), but in fact neither Hypsipyle nor Medea, in their letters, make mention of the rejuvenation, and if the poet did go directly to Ovid for this detail it must have been to the Metamorphoses.
Nicky Hallett, ‘Women’, in Peter Brown (ed.), A Companion to Chaucer (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 480–94 (482–3).
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 1069. All quotations from Chaucer’s work are from this edition.
Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), p. 77.
Suzanne C. Hagedorn, Abandoned Women: Rewriting the Classics in Dante, Boccaccio and Chaucer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), p. 165. For this kind of catalogue tradition, see McLeod, Virtue and Venom; and Cowen, ‘Women as Exempla’, pp. 52–3.
Lisa J. Kiser, Telling Classical Tales: Chaucer and the ‘Legend of Good Women’ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 97.
See also John M. Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 104.
John Kerrigan (ed.), Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and ‘Female Complaint’, a Critical Anthology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 28.
Dorothy Kempe, ‘A Middle English Tale of Troy’, Englische Studien 29 (1901), pp. 1–26 (8).
For Laurent’s expansion of Medea’s story as he found it in Boccaccio, see Patricia M. Gathercole, ‘Laurent de Premierfait: The Translator of Boccaccio’s De Casibus Virorum Illustrium’, French Review 27.4 (1954), pp. 245–52 (248–9). Gathercole points to what she calls Laurent’s ‘passion to instruct’ (p. 249) though his additions tend to be factual, whereas Lydgate’s are very often more judgemental. For Lydgate’s expansion of Laurent, see also Morse, Medieval Medea, pp. 209–13.
Laurent de Premierfait, ‘Des Cas des Nobles Hommes et Femmes’, Book 1: Translated from Boccaccio. A Critical Edition Based on Six MSS, ed. Patricia M. Gathercole (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968). Translations from Laurent de Premierfait are my own.
John Lydgate, The Fall of Princes, ed. Henry Bergen, 4 vols, Early English Text Society XS 121–4 (London: Oxford University Press, 1924–7).
Raoul Lefèvre, L’Histoire de Jason, trans. William Caxton, ed. John Munro, Early English Text Society XS 111 (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. and Oxford University Press, 1913).
For the French text, see Raoul Lefèvre, L’Histoire de Jason, ed. Gert Pinkernell (Frankfurt: Athenäum Verlag, 1971). While authors like Lydgate could alter their sources drastically, while claiming simply to render them English, McDonald notes that Caxton’s translation is ‘remarkably close, virtually word-for-word’, and that ‘For the most part Caxton’s additions have no bearing on the portrayal of Medea’ (‘“Diverse Folk”’, pp. 266–7).
See Ruth Morse, ‘Problems of Early Fiction: Raoul Lefèvre’s Histoire de Jason’, MLR 78.1 (1980), pp. 34–45 (35). She notes that Philippe’s choice of Jason as a kind of figurehead for the Order could well have invited ridicule, and that this informs Lefèvre’s determined rewriting of his hero (and heroine).
For ‘inverse coverture’, see Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth Century Print Culture (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 61.
Timothy Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 26.
I quote from the facsimile edition of the manuscript, which is now held at Magdalene College Cambridge: Ovid, Metamorphoses of Ovid, trans. William Caxton, 2 vols (New York: George Braziller in association with Magdalene College Cambridge, 1968). For a discussion of the text, including examples of Caxton’s anxious approach to other female figures in the Metamorphoses, see Liz Oakley-Brown, Ovid and the Cultural Politics of Translation in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), ch. 6.
See Ovid, ‘Echo and Narcissus’, trans. William Caxton, in Sarah Annes Brown and Andrew Taylor (eds), Ovid in English, 1480–1625, Part 1: ‘Metamorphoses’ (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2013), p. 19.
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Heavey, K. (2015). Medieval Medea. In: The Early Modern Medea. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137466242_2
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