Ovid (43 BCE - 17/18 CE)
Three fragments from the Metamorphoses, in Latin, manuscript on vellum [Italy?, late 12th century].
Three fragments from the 12th century of one of the greatest works of Latin literature, Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

259 x 107mm., 255 x c.75mm. and c.230 x c.105mm. The first and most complete fragment with 50 partial lines of text in an early gothic script, blind-ruled, containing Metamorphoses II.322-421 ‘etsi non cecidit, potuit cecidisse videri’ to ‘et pinctam posita pharetram cervice preme[bat]’; the second fragment with II.422-521 ‘Iuppiter ut vidit fessam et custode vacan[tem]’ to ‘[esse homin]em vetui: facta est dea sic ego poenas’; the third with I.601-701 ‘[Interea medios Iuno despexit] in Argos’ to ‘et [precibus spretis fugisse per avia nympham]’, contemporary and near-contemporary marginal and interlinear glosses (all three fragments recovered from bindings, stained and cropped to a greater or lesser extent, remnants of adhesive, a few wormholes, fading to text).

Provenance:
Colker MS 463; acquired in 1994 from Quaritch.

A genre-busting mythological poem, the Metamorphoses remains one of the most influential works in Western culture, and deeply impacted the works of authors such as Dante Alighieri, Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare. It was extremely popular throughout late antiquity and the Middle Ages, and is represented by over 400 surviving complete or fragmentary manuscripts. The format and script of the present fragments is similar to Lausanne, Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire Ms 403.

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