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PSS '23 Keynote: Peggy McCracken (UMichigan)

Date
Thu April 13th 2023, 5:00 - 6:00pm
Location
Hohbach 122, in Green Library
(Main floor, near circulation desk)

“History and Embodiment in the Ovide moralisé

Abstract for this keynote presentation:

The fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé is itself a historical reading of a primary text. The translator-adaptor moralizes Ovid’s Metamorphoses and reads them as representations of sacred and secular history. In this study, I read the Ovide moralisé as a historical and a theoretical text, that is, as a primary source that both makes historiographical claims and theorizes the bodies through which such claims are articulated. I will focus in particular on the story of Calisto, raped by Jupiter, transformed into a bear by Juno, and then into a constellation by Jupiter. More broadly, I will interrogate the articulation of history on the (transformed) bodies of women and the inscription of history on the transformed bodies of animals.