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RESEARCH PRODUCT

“Audacem faciebat amor” : Thisbe, an Ovidian Heroine from Antiquity to the 15th century

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In the Middle Ages, the fable of Pyramus and Thisbe from Ovid's Metamorphoses and older sources presents a range of varied representations, translated, reworked, transposed to serve literary, allegorical and moral purposes. This timeless love story has been adapted to multiples genres and purposes and became part of the literary and pictorial collective imagination. We explore the multiform reception of this fable to the 15th century in Latin and vernacular texts along with their illustrations in order to draw its diachronic evolution from its origins. We try to understand how authors appropriate the myth and deliver their own interpretation according to the context by filtering the elements that persist despite its changes of form and determining their variations and permanent features. What sense does rewriting or mentioning the fable take on, in what way does it become a topical figure of love leading to death, of love against death, an example or a counter-example? How does Thisbe, whose audacity and freedom of love speech seem to open the way to other female characters after her, become, from an Ovidian character, a courteous, virtuous, Marian character, and actually a fully-fledged medieval heroine?