Biography

Caroline Engelmayer is a doctoral candidate in English and Classics at Harvard University. Her research explores receptions of classical literature in early modern England and Italy, with a focus on drama, epic, and lyric poetry. She holds a BA in Classics from Harvard University and an MPhil in English Renaissance Literature from the University of Cambridge, where she was the Lionel de Jersey Scholar at Emmanuel College. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Classical Receptions Journal, Memoria di Shakespeare, Classical Philology, The Chaucer Review, and Milton Studies.
 

Project Summary

Ovid’s Heroides as Historia: Myth and Verisimilitude in the European Renaissance aims to develop a new literary history of the rise of realist fiction by attending to early modern receptions of Ovid’s Heroides. A collection of fictional letters from the abandoned women of classical mythology to the heroes who deserted them, the Heroides straddle the line between fictionality and verisimilitude. They are pseudepigraphic letters that traffic in fictions of authorship, yet they also mimic the “real-world” conventions of Roman epistolography and follow the precepts for crafting complaints (conquestiones) set out in rhetorical handbooks. As a result, medieval and Renaissance commentators often identified Ovid’s Metamorphoses as fabulae (stories that did not happen and could not have happened) but categorized the Heroides as argumenta (stories that did not happen but could have) or historiae (stories that actually happened). Moving beyond prior studies of the early modern Heroides, which argue that Renaissance writers limited the rhetorical expression and sexual freedoms of Ovid’s letter-writers, this project thus explores how early modern authors of epic and lyric poetry turned to the Heroides to assimilate myth to the conceptual category of the lifelike. In doing so, it challenges the longstanding scholarly narrative of opposition between myth and verisimilitude. It argues that, in the Renaissance, the Heroides were a collection of myths that were also real.