Episode Details

Tracing same-sex and transgender themes in Ovid’s Classical Roman tale of forbidden love across the ages.

In this episode we talk about:

• Who was Ovid and what type of story was the Metamorphoses?
• The basic plot of the story and the motif of inappropriate love objects
• Gender identity and sexuality in Iphis and Ianthe
• Medieval transmission and the purpose of the “moralized Ovid”
• The Renaissance translations return to Ovid’s original
• Adapting Iphis in Yde and Olive and Gallathea
• Iphis and Ianthe as a mirror for women through the centuries looking for a model of same-sex love
• References
  • Caxton, William. 2013. The Booke of Ovyde Named Methamorphose. Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto. ISBN 978-0-88844-182-9
  • Durling, Nancy Vine. 1989. “Rewriting Gender: Yde et Olive and Ovidian Myth” in Romance Languages Annual 1: 256-62.
  • Golding, Arthur. 1567. P. Ouidius Naso, entytuled Metamorphosis, translated oute of Latin into English meeter. Willyam Seres, London.
  • Gower, John. 2013. Confessio Amantis vol. 2 edited by Russell A. Peck, with Latin translations by Andrew Galloway. TEAMS Middle English Texts Series. Medieval Institute Publications, Kalamazoo.
  • Hallett, Judith P. 1997. “Female Homoeroticism and the Denial of Roman Reality in Latin Literature” in Roman Sexualities, ed. By Judith P. Hallett & Marilyn B. Skinner, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
  • Hubbard, Thomas K. 2003. Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: A Sourcebook of Basic Documents. University of California Press, Berkeley. ISBN 978-0-520-23430-7
  • Mills, Robert. 2015. Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. ISBN 978-0-226-16912-5
  • Pintabone, Diane T. "Ovid's Iphis and Ianthe: When Girls Won't Be Girls” in Rabinowitz, Nancy Sorkin & Lisa Auanger eds. 2002. Among Women: From the Homosocial to the Homoerotic in the Ancient World. University of Texas Press, Austin. ISBN 0-29-77113-4
  • Watt, Diane 1998. "Behaving like a man? Incest, Lesbian desire, and gender play in 'Yde et Olive' and its adaptations", Comparative Literature, 50, 4 (Fall 1998): 265-85.
  • Walen, Denise A. 2005. Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. ISBN 978-1-4039-6875-3
• The full text of Gower’s Confessio Amantis can be found at the website of the TEAMS Middle English Texts Series
• The full text of Golding’s 1567 translation of the Metamorphoses is available from Wikisource
• This topic is discussed in one or more entries of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project here: Metamorphoses: Iphis and Ianthe (Ovid)