UNDERLINING THE EROTIC IN OVID
OVIDIUS Naso, Publius.
Amatoria. Quorum indicem sequens continet pagella.
Lyons, Sebastian Gryphius, 1554.
8vo, pp. 397, [1]; woodcut printer’s device to title and at end, woodcut initials; lower outer corner of xx8 torn with loss of the initial words of four lines of text, outer edges of the first quire and last few leaves frayed, 3 small wormholes to lower margins of first few quires, one carrying on throughout, title lightly duststained, instances of light dampstaining or light browning elsewhere, nevertheless a good copy; bound in contemporary blind-tooled pigskin, sides with central panels of palmettes surrounded by a roll-tool comprising biblical scenes (Annunciation, Baptism, Crucifixion, and Resurrection), spine blind-tooled in compartments; free endpapers repaired along the margins, panelling on the outer side of both covers worn or obscured in parts, skilful repairs to board-edges; seventeenth-century ownership inscription ‘Sum ex libris Fischeri Schwertzenbachensis ad Saalam Narisc’ (‘Fischer’ of Scharzenbach an der Saale in Upper Franconia) to title, contemporary annotations throughout the text, underlinings, and a manuscript list of mythological couples mentioned by Ovid to the front free endpaper.
Attractive annotated copy of a successful edition of the collection of Ovid’s poems on love, comprising Heroidum epistolae, Auli Sabini…epistolae III, Elegiarum libri III, de Remedio amoris libri III, ad Liviam de morte Drusi, de Nuce, de Medicamine faciei, Fragmenta, Carmen ad Pisonem, and Halieutica, printed by the ‘prince’ of Lyonnais printer-publishers (Febvre and Martin). This edition was a reprint of Gryphius’s first Ovid, published in 1540.
Our copy bears the annotations of a contemporary reader. The careful listing of mythological couples penned in ink to the front free endpaper testifies to a particular interest in the Heroides, Ovid’s collection of verse letters purportedly written by illustrious or mythical abandoned women to their lovers, first-person laments and appeals from, among others, Dido, Ariadne, Briseis, Penelope. The Heroides were a great publishing success throughout the Renaissance, even more evidently so in the last two thirds of the sixteenth century, when public appetite challenged the previously unquestioned preference for the Metamorphoses. The Heroides, and with them Ovid’s other elegiac works, were widely commented upon, translated, and imitated in the Renaissance.
None of Ovid’s amatory works, however, escape our reader’s laconic yet thorough attention. Not confined to the concerns of grammarians, rhetoricians, and moral philosophers, the marginal annotations and some underlining, extend even to the most explicit passages of the Ars amatoria, sometimes specifically marked with an encircled cross, and, remarkably, to passages where advice in the art of seduction is given to women. The reading marks indicate an understanding of and an openness to Ovid’s specific emphasis on what was present but not prominent in other Latin elegy: its ‘capacity for comedy and satire’ (Mack), as well as overt sensuality.
Rare outside Continental Europe: OCLC finds 3 copies in the US (Missouri, Yale, Columbia); 3 copies in the UK (BL, Manchester, Liverpool); 1 at Trinity College, Dublin.
USTC 123190; BM STC French, p. 332; Pettegree, Walsby and Wilkinson 81359; Schweiger II, 634; von Gültlingen, V p. 204, 1283.
