Abstract
Abstract With his ‘Ovidius moralizatus’ ( c. 1340 ), a Christian-allegorical interpretation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Petrus Berchorius ( Pierre Bersuire ) significantly contributed to the rehabilitation of Classic mythology across Christian Europe, and the treatise was widely distributed in various manuscripts for almost two centuries. When it first appeared in printing in 1509, however, the book encountered a significantly different intellectual environment, and it became involved in the dispute between traditionally minded Dominicans and a group of pre-reformation humanists which escalated in the ( in- )famous ‘Pfefferkorn controversy’ at Cologne university. Its humanist critics mocked the work of the alleged Dominican Berchorius ( in fact, he had been a Benedictine ) in their famous satire ‘Epistolae obscurorum virorum’, ridiculing Berchorius’ Christian interpretation of Classical mythology.
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