Heroic Epistles: Ovid’s Heroides, Female Heroism, and Women’s Lyric Epic

• In Event: Translating Epic and Lyric

Abstract

Monteverdi’s Arianna, Ariosto’s Olimpia: Ovid’s Heroides inspired Renaissance lyric and epic poets and composers to create some of their most memorable heroines. Scholars often conclude that these women were understood as helpless victims, whose ability to lament their fates depended upon their marginalized status and whose abandonment was justified by their attempts to appropriate for themselves the sexual and matrimonial agency that belonged to their male relatives. But the Heroides also offered women a path into authorship: some of the earliest Italian lyrics by women and the first published poem by a woman writing in English engage the Heroides in sophisticated imitative games. This paper will explore the Heroides as a site of translation and translatio—from Latin to the vernacular, from reception to authorship, from epic to lyric—to suggest that the Heroides offered women authors space to explore female heroism and the female epic voice.

Author

• Sarah van der Laan, Indiana University