Introduction -- "If all the yearth wer parchment scribable": Ovidian heroines in the Querelle des femmes -- "Hir name, allas! is publisshed so wyde": Fama, gossip, and the dissemination of a pseudo-Ovdian heroine -- "Both false and also true": Ovidian heroines, epistolary elegy, and the fictions of materiality -- "Our sainted legendarie": The Anglo-Ovidian heroines of De Casibus tradition
Focusing on the postclassical discourses that Ovid's poetry stimulated, this study explores how Ovid's English protégés - including Isabella Whitney, William Shakespeare and Michael Drayton - replicated and expanded upon the Roman poet's distinctive and frequently remarked 'bookishness' in their own adaptations of his works. Reid analyzes how Ovidian-inspired mythologies and bibliographical aetiologies informed the sixteenth-century creation, reproduction, and representation of books, and provides alternative models for thinking about the dynamics of reception, adaptation, and imitatio