Epilogue: The Multiple Medeas of the Middle Ages

Abstract

Insofar as we can know, Medea has always been multiple, existing in many different versions simultaneously. She is never simply a literary construction, a stratified intertextual ensemble made up of all the other literary Medeas that came before her, but a product of the values and fears of each culture that imagines her, recreates her, and uses her to represent meaning. The Middle Ages were no different: Medea could figure as an alchemist's guide, as in the Pretiosa Margarita Novella (the New Pearl of Great Price); as an allegory of God fighting the Antichrist in the Ovide Moralisé; as wronged wife in Geoffrey Chaucer's Legend of Good Women; or as a nightmare figure that appears like Grendel in Beowulf to destroy Jason's wedding feast in Raoul Lefèvre's History of Jason. The flexibility of the medieval myth of Medea is staggering—even more staggering than that of the Roman period—stretched as it was across a continent of warring kingdoms, with different authors and audiences pressing classical texts to generate new and culturally relevant and acceptable meanings. However, appropriately enough for a volume titled ‘Roman Medea’, there is one multiple of Medea that drops out of the equation as a direct influence: the Greek Medea, the Medea of Euripides and Apollonius. The loss of the Greek tradition did not impede medieval authors, who found more than enough in Latin texts to inspire them. The basic Latin materials upon which the Middle Ages built their Medeas were Ovid's Metamorphoses and Heroides, along with scattered references in other popular authors like Statius, presentations of irrational women in love like Dido in Virgil, descriptions of child murderers such as Procne also taken from the Metamorphoses, and terrifying witches such as Lucan's Erictho. However, some Latin texts which we might have expected to be influential, such as Seneca's Medea, were marginal to the medieval tradition.