The Epilogue draws together the various threads of the book by evaluating the pseudo-Ovidian De vetula, a thirteenth-century forgery of Ovid which claims to be written by Ovid in exile. The Epilogue asks whether, in the light of this book’s previous chapters, De vetula constitutes an ‘authentically exilic Ovid’. Menmuir shows that Ovidian exile facilitates the forgery of De vetula, underpinning its very existence and authenticating an array of blatantly medieval features as genuinely Ovidian. However, having used Ovid’s exile and his exile poetry as a springboard, the poem subsequently departs from Ovid in exile, framing the Ovid of the last book of the poem as a thirteenth-century scholar and a budding Christian to boot. Each chapter of the book is relevant to this fraudulent Ovidian transformation. De vetula is framed as the first response to both Ovid’s exile and his exile poetry, fictitiously bridging the gap between Ovid’s responses (discussed in Chapter 1) and the scholarly and literary responses covered in Chapters 2 and 3. As a forgery of Ovidian exile, the author ‘becomes the exile’ but pushes the second part of this book to extremes by replacing the genuine Ovid’s exilic poetry and life.

The fourteenth-century poet John Gower was a prodigiously Ovidian author, especially throughout his Latin Vox clamantis and English Confessio amantis. It is in the Vox clamantis, and its first book the Visio Anglie, where Gower fully engaged with Ovid in exile, and where he became the Ovidian exile in the ways theorised in Chapter 4. While Gower did not experience exile or marginalisation in real life, in the Visio he inhabits Ovidian exile to respond to the 1381 Uprising. Menmuir firstly speculates how Gower might have read Ovid’s exile poetry. She also considers different theoretical approaches to Gower’s use of Ovid, including cento. Thereafter, the chapter progresses sequentially through the Visio, charting Gower’s range of approaches to the exilic Ovid. At the opening of the Visio, Gower compresses prevailing themes of the exile poetry. Chapter 16 of the Visio is the height of Gower’s Ovidian exilic inhabitation, where Gower shifts to speaking in a first-person voice. The storm at sea in the Visio is drawn from Ovid in exile. Finally, a voice from Heaven speaks to the Gowerian narrator but is in fact a mouthpiece for Ovid in exile.

The Introduction establishes the primary arguments and scope of the book. It defines ‘Ovidian exile’ in two related ways: firstly, as the poetry written by Ovid in exile, namely the Tristia, Epistulae ex Ponto and Ibis; and secondly, as Ovid himself as the figure of the exiled poet. Ovidian exile in these terms had a vast influence across medieval culture, informing teaching, preaching, reading and writing – among a host of activities Menmuir terms ‘responses’ – in the later Middle Ages, offering a mode of voicing exile, marginalisation and poethood itself. After describing the circumstances of Ovid’s exile and the primary concerns of the exile poetry, Menmuir introduces the Ovid, or Ovids, of the Middle Ages, including the common perception of Ovid as the tripartite mythographer, lover and exile. Ovid and his works were deemed ethical, and even Christian, in medieval exegesis: the fact of his exile created a penitential arc which enabled Ovid’s transformation into Ovidius ethicus. Menmuir defines ‘responses and respondents’, where ‘response’ comprises a more active expression of ‘reception’. The book’s scope primarily includes responses between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries and focuses on England, albeit as linked to the continent in several ways.

Chapter 2 explores the influence of the exilic Ovid in medieval scholastic contexts by examining three types of medieval forms. Firstly, accessus (introductions to authors) shaped how Ovid’s poetry would be interpreted: their heavy reliance on Ovid’s exilic self-fashioning and biographising meant that Ovidian exile came to frame Ovid’s entire corpus. Secondly, manuscripts of Ovid’s exile poetry and their paratexts, especially glosses and marginal annotations, provided a framework for teaching and learning through Ovid’s exile. Finally, florilegia and excerpted forms of Ovid’s exile poetry posed a challenge to that life–work connection formed by the exile poetry, ostensibly withdrawing the context of Ovid’s full output; but they nevertheless retained enough order for Ovid’s exile to be recognisable. Examining these forms illustrates two key aspects of medieval responses to Ovid’s exile. Accessus, glosses and florilegia are all deeply connected to pedagogy and to a medieval ‘scholastic sphere’ – monastic and secular places of learning in which Ovidian exile could be used to teach and preach. Further, the proliferation, diversity and sheer quantity of these different types of exilic Ovidiana are evidence for the popularity and widespread knowledge of Ovid and his exile in the later Middle Ages.

Chapter 1 presents Ovid in exile as a highly self-conscious, reflexive figure whose ironic turns perforate a real desire to effect both an imperial pardon and poetic immortality. Moreover, the chapter situates Ovid as the first respondent to his exile, finding many points of commonality between the ways that Ovid and medieval respondents reacted to his exile (in other words, medieval audiences used Ovid as a model for their responses). This chapter makes these arguments from three perspectives. Firstly, it characterises Ovid’s response, focusing especially on his desire to control the narrative being relayed both to Augustus in Rome and to posterity. Secondly, it explores Ovid’s tendency to revise his works. He edits and revises his pre-exilic poetry from the perspective of his exile and reworks his exile poetry over the course of his relegation. Finally, it argues that Ovid’s depictions of his exile as severe are another vehicle for modelling a flexible response. Overall, Ovid constructed an authoritative hold over his life and works but nevertheless formed a response which allowed for ambiguities that could be embedded into that authority. This double model allowed medieval respondents to incorporate both equivocation and authority into their own poetic self-presentation.

While most of Johnson’s paid professional writing was in prose, he wrote accomplished poetry from the age of 15 until the last month of his life, and often poured into it his most personal feelings – especially those poems and verse prayers which he wrote in Latin. Most celebrated are Johnson’s two imitations of satires by Juvenal. In London, the first of these, Johnson adopted the light personification (‘unrewarded science toils in vain’) which became his trademark. The second, The Vanity of Human Wishes, is the quintessential Johnsonian work, a meditation on false hope whose conclusion can be read as either tragic or optimistic. The same theme runs through Johnson’s fictional writing – the shorter tales as well as his longest, Rasselas. This gently comic work, much of it merely episodic, follows the Abyssinian Prince, Rasselas, as he seeks the answer to life – and ends on another ambiguous conclusion.

All his life, Hopkins was either student or teacher of the Classics. School, university, teaching posts, and finally a professorship in Dublin meant that he was engaged professionally with Latin and Greek almost without intermission. There are subjects, topics, or words in his writings which obviously derive directly from those studies, and there are approaches which were plainly learned from his experience. Specific examples of influence are betrayed by words and ideas, but the influence is perhaps more general; in word order, for example, or in the idea of poetry as speech, which connects with his discovery and use of Sprung Rhythm. His understanding of rhythm is the most important thing which his classical studies nurtured. In his university training and in his own teaching rhythm was a central concern. The Classics gave him models to follow, but they also freed him from some conventions of English poetry, which allowed him to write in an original style.

The first section of this introduction sets the scene for the volume as a whole by briefly considering the history of intertextuality within modern classical scholarship, both Latin and Greek, and then highlighting the special methodological and historical challenges that attend on comparative approaches to early Greek literature. As scholars increasingly agree on the need to read early Greek literature in a comparative way, it is argued, this only makes more urgent the question of how best to do so. The second section of the introduction highlights some of the core methodological, historical, and literary preoccupations of this book by exploring in chronological order two contrastive and complementary case studies from early elegy, one from Tyrtaeus and one from Simonides. Rather than providing a set of definitive answers about how these texts relate to epic tradition and/or particular epics, this section aims to give a sense of the sort of questions at stake in the following chapters. The introduction then concludes by summarising each of those chapters and highlighting interconnections between them.

Chapter 6 explores charms’ re-purposing of liturgical texts from a theoretical perspective. The integrity of baptismal and Visitatio utterances and acts may be compromised, from a liturgical perspective, when they are reused for charm healing. The accommodations that result allow charms simultaneously to invoke those sacramental liturgies while accomplishing something different. As charms manipulate prayers and formulas extracted from liturgy for folk healing, the re-contextualization results in disparities. These prove important because they reveal the integration of ecclesiastical texts and gestures into traditional practices. When charms adapt particular liturgical texts and actions, the liturgical forms undergo a pragmatic-linguistic process of “de-institutionalization.” The loss of extra-linguistic context supports the charms’ discursive ends and reinforces its status as a distinct institution.