Transforming Lovers and Memorials in Ovid and Marie de France

Late medieval authors were fascinated by classical literature, by what for all practical purposes functioned as the literary canon for readers and writers of the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries. As made clear by earlier scholarship — which often, however, interpreted medieval reception of classical literature as badly understood — medieval writers did not simply honour or completely authorize their predecessors. Indeed, more comfortable with the idea of tradition than slavish imitators are, medieval poets transformed classical texts in any number of ways, often feeling at liberty to change even critical narrative elements in the process. They did so, apparently, for different purposes, but one of the most interesting, it seems to me, was to explore what writing meant in their own literary circles.