“Sensitive topics” in the Medieval School. Censorship and Interpretation in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Commentary of the Vaticanus Latinus 1479

The paper proposes an investigation into the broad exegetical production concerning the Metamorphoses, from the first authorial commentaries of schoolmasters like Arnulf and William of Orléans up to the later scholiastic compilations of the so-called Commentum Vulgatum and that, likewise anonymous, transmitted by the Vaticanus Latinus 1479 (sec. XIV). The investigation on the marginalia of the last Commentary shows that in order to provide the fables with an allegorical framework, the commentator relied principally upon Arnulf’s Allegoriae and John of Garland’s Integumenta Ovidii, whose elegiac couplets introduce and precede the explanatory glosses of each book. Differently from the Vulgate Commentary, transmitted as a plethora of interlinear and marginal glosses surrounding and sometimes stifling the page, the Author of the Vatican Commentary seems to have come up to a precise project of rationalizing the content and the form of the exegetical stratification on the Metamorphoses. In the Vatican glosses it’s possible to detect and catch simultaneously different medieval perspectives on Ovid’s text. Some examples taken from myths of rape, forced or attempted sex, pederasty and incest, illustrate the free attitude of the Medieval commentator towards such sensitive issues. Through these examples we can explore how a Medieval reader and student could read and misread the proper sense of Ovid’s dictate.