Voice and species in the Ovide moralisé

Abstract

In this article, I show that the author of the Ovide moralisé exaggerates vocal difference when compared to Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the case of most instances of non-human metamorphoses. The exceptions are winged animals, especially birds, where the author of Ovide moralisé instead minimizes vocal difference or suppresses it entirely. In the second section, I explore what this conception of shared human and avian vox might mean for the authorial conception of language in Ovide moralisé. I suggest that the author intended to emphasize humans’ frequent use of Jakobson’s phatic function of language, a function often attributed to birds by various thinkers (including Jakobson himself and Isidore of Seville). Moreover, I suggest he draws attention to a shared human and avian propensity for quotation and for sonic repetition. After noting the relevance of the question of intention in language production in the context of debates about large language models (LLMs), I suggest that we are, in the Ovide moralisé author’s view, probably all stochastic parrots.