A Commentary on Ovid, Remedia Amoris

by Victoria Rimell

• ISBN13: 9780192894212
• ISBN10: 0192894218
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2024-04-01
• Publisher: Oxford University Press Academic UK

Summary

The Ovidian Renaissance seems to have left the Remedia Amoris behind. The poem has remained marginal, read either as a reversal of the Ars Amatoria's teaching that brings the world of Ovidian elegy to a banal end, or as an over-determined supplement to the Ars which ironically fails in its ostensible aim of 'curing' the dissatisfied lover. While recent work has explored how the poem functions not just as a palinode to, but also as a continuation of, the Ars, the critical status quo continues to present it as a minor appendage rather than as an important chapter in Ovid's project as a poet of desire. Victoria Rimell's commentary resets critical perspectives by reading the Remedia as distinctive and original, and as a pivotal text within Ovid's oeuvre as a whole. In her immersive, creatively interpretative guide to the poem, the Remedia emerges as an intricate work that interacts with medical texts, works on rhetoric, law, magic and ritual, philosophical thinking about self-discipline, the irrational, consolation and therapy for the soul, as well as with Greco-Roman satire, lyric, epigram, and traditions of didactic and erotodidactic verse. The poem, Rimell argues, is a key node in Ovid's development of a poetics of paradox, reversibility, and auto-immunity.

Author Biography

Victoria Rimell, Professor of Latin, University of Warwick

Victoria Rimell is Professor of Latin at the University of Warwick, and has written extensively on Ovid and early imperial Latin literature. Her books include Ovid's Lovers: Desire, Difference and the Poetic Imagination (2006), and The Closure of Space in Roman Poetics (2015).

Table of Contents

Introduction1. Poisonous cures: the Remedia in Ovid2. The erotodidactic tradition, 'technical' texts, and the Remedia 3. Structure4. Organisational principles5. Ovid's double audience in the Remedia6. Title7. Date8. Receptions9. Manuscript traditionText and critical apparatusSiglaRemedia Amoris: TextCommentaryAbbreviations