Medieval Ovid Frame Narrative and Political Allegory [Hardcover]

Ovid's Metamorphoses played an irrefutably important role in the integration of pagan mythology in Christian texts during the Middle Ages. This book is the only study to consider this Ovidian revival as part of a cultural shift disintegrating the boundaries between not only sacred and profane literacy but also between academic and secular politics.1. Introduction: Reframing the Frame Narrative 2. Rethinking Ovid: The Commentary Tradition 3. Communal Narrative: Boccaccio and the Historical Paraphrase Tradition 4. Clerical Expansion and Narrative Diminution in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales 5. Overlapping Mythologies: The Political Afterlives of Frame Narratives in Gower's Confessio Amantis and Lydgate's Fall of Princes 6. ConclusionAmanda J. Gerber is Assistant Professor at Eastern New Mexico University, USA.