Chretien's Cliges and the Ovidian Spirit

Abstract

THE indebtedness of Chretien to the poetry of has long been evident. We know that he translated the Ars anwtoria and the story of Philomela from the Metamorphoses, and what he says at the beginning of Cliges may imply that he also translated the Remedia amoris and the story of Tantalus and Pelops. F. E. Guyer has demonstrated that there are numerous reflections of Ovid's poetry in Cliges, Lancelot, and Yvain, and that the conception of love in these romances owes much to Ovid.1 We have recently been reminded in an essay by Jessie Crossland that imitation of played a large part in the development of love poetry from the time of Charlemagne to the sixteenth century,2 so that Chretien's indebtedness to is only what we should expect of a poet who wrote of love during a period which has been called the Age of Ovid. There were other influences at work in Chretien's poetry, some of them more important than the influence, but a more definite conception of what meant to Chretien should be at least of some help in the interpretation of his work. In the present paper I wish to suggest some of the problems involved in formulating a conception of this kind. If Chretien and his contemporaries were guilty of basing conclusions on Ovid misunderstood, as some have alleged, we should at least try to discover just how was The Ovidian spirit, a term which I shall use to designate the wider implications of Ovid's attitudes and literary techniques, has not been by any means uniformly conceived in modern times. That is, there is still no very clear distinction between Ovid understood and Ovid misunderstood. As one scholar who was dissatisfied with certain