Glossing Books 1 and 2 of the Pseudo-Ovidian <i>De vetula</i>

This article examines and transcribes the glosses to Books 1 and 2 of the De vetula, a popular thirteenth-century forgery of Ovid. In this lengthy three-book poem, “Ovid” first explores youthful pastimes and games in Book 1, before inveighing against eunuchs and becoming entangled in a fabliau-like tale in Book 2. In Book 3, “Ovid” turns away from his amatory pursuits to divine the birth of Christ using medieval scholastic debates and astrological calculations. A previous article by the authors focused on the glosses to Book 3, revealing a polymath glossator keenly interested in Arabic sciences and astrology in particular. It suggested that the author of the glosses is Roger Bacon, already a proposed author for the text of the poem itself, and argued that the glosses and the poem are inextricably linked in their pursuit of authenticating the De vetula as a genuinely Ovidian poem. The present article characterizes the glosses to the first two books of the poem, comparing these glosses to those found in Book 3. While the core specialist interests of mathematics (in Book 1) and biology (in Book 2) differ from the glossatorial focus of astrology in Book 3, we argue that the same glossator must have composed the core glosses to all three books of De vetula, and further that this glossator is Roger Bacon. Moreover, we can trace a changing relationship between the glosses and Ovid (both the real Roman author and the narrator of the De vetula) over the course of Books 1, 2, and 3. The Appendix transcribes all glosses in the common corpus of scholia to Books 1 and 2, something not currently available in the three primary editions of the poem, complementing the previous article’s transcription of the glosses to Book 3.