Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T09:42:12.210Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Women reading men: the female audience of the Ars amatoria

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2013

Sharon L. James
Sharon L. James
Affiliation:
Department of Classics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

The female readership of the Ars amatoria has been for two millennia a subject fraught with problems both historical and theoretical. For example: in antiquity, did respectable women read the poem? Almost certainly, and they were almost certainly expected to. Were they intended to? Here less certainty is possible, not only because of the problem of divining authorial intention. Did non-respectable women, the real life analogues to the poem's fictive courtesans, read the Ars? Some of them – the elite ones – must have, but lower-level courtesans would have had less opportunity to acquire copies of the poem. On the textual, rather than historical, level, other questions remain, most of them unanswerable, such as the sincerity of the poem's disclaimers to matronae, the No-Wives-Allowed signs. The deliberate textual confusion between matrona and meretrix in Ars 3 blurs clear distinctions and makes it impossible to tell if the praeceptor Amoris anticipates or seeks respectable, elite women, in addition to his declared readers, the courtesans.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Cambridge Classical Journal , Volume 54 , 2008 , pp. 136 - 159
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s). Published online by Cambridge University Press 2008

References

WORKS CITED

Adams, J. N. (1982) The Latin sexual vocabulary, Baltimore.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Armstrong, R. (2005) Ovid and his love poetry, London.Google Scholar
Atherton, C. (ed.) (1998) Form and content in didactic poetry, Bari.Google Scholar
Bailey, C. (1954) Lucreti De rerum natura libri sex. Editio altera, Oxford (1 st edn. 1928).Google Scholar
Barchiesi, A. (2006) ‘Women on top: Livia and Andromache’, in Gibson, , Green, , and Sharrock, , 96–120.Google Scholar
Brandt, P. (1902) P. Ouidi Nasonis De arte amatoria libri tres. Text und Kommentar, Leipzig.Google Scholar
Brandt, P. (1911) P. Ouidi Nasonis Amorum libri tres.Google Scholar
Brown, R. D. (1987) Lucretius on love and sex. A commentary on De rerum ratura IV, 1030–1287 with prolegomena, text, and translation, Leiden.Google Scholar
Clay, D. (1998) ‘The theory of the literary persona in antiquity’, MD 40, 9–40.Google Scholar
Conte, G. B. (1994) Genres and readers: Lucretius, love elegy, Pliny's encyclopedia, trans. Most, G. W., Baltimore.Google Scholar
Copley, F. (1956) Exclusus amator: a study in Latin love poetry, APA Monograph Series no. 17, Baltimore.Google Scholar
Dalzell, A. (1996) The criticism of didactic poetry: essays on Lucretius, Virgil, and Ovid, Toronto.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davis, P. J. (2006) Ovid and Augustus: a political reading of Ovid's erotic poems, London.Google Scholar
Dover, K. J. (1964) ‘The poetry of Archilochus’, in Archiloque, Entretiens Hardt, vol. 10, Vandoeuvres Geneva, 181–222.Google Scholar
Durling, R. (1958) ‘Ovid as praeceptor Amoris’, CJ 53, 157–67.Google Scholar
Durling, R. (1965) The figure of the poet in Renaissance epic, Cambridge, Mass.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Effe, B. (1977) Dictung und Lehre: Untersuchungen zur Typologie des antiken Lehregedichts, Munich.Google Scholar
Fedeli, P. (1984) Propertius, Stuttgart.Google Scholar
Fredrick, D. (1997) ‘Reading broken skin: violence in Roman elegy’, in Hallett, J. and Skinner, M. (eds.) Roman sexualities, Princeton, 172–93.Google Scholar
Fulkerson, L. (2004) ‘Omnia vincit Amor, why the Remedia fail’, CQ 54, 211–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibson, B. (1999) ‘Ovid on reading: reading Ovid. Reception in Ovid, Tristia II’, JRS 89, 19–37.Google Scholar
Gibson, R. K. (1998a) ‘Didactic poetry as “popular” form: a study of imperatival expressions in Latin didactic verse and prose’, in Atherton, 67–98.Google Scholar
Gibson, R. K. (1998b) ‘Meretrix or matrona? Stereotypes in Ovid, Ars amatoria 3’, PLLS 10, 295–312.Google Scholar
Gibson, R. K. (2003) Ovid: Ars amatoria book 3, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Gibson, R. K. (2006) ‘Ovid, Augustus, and the politics of moderation in Ars amatoria 3’, in Gibson, , Green, , and Sharrock, , 121–42.Google Scholar
Gibson, R. K. (2007) Excess & restraint: Propertius, Horace & Ovid's Ars amatoria, London.Google Scholar
Gibson, R., Green, S., and Sharrock, A. (eds.) (2006) The art of love: bimillennial essays on Ovid's Ars Amatoria and Remedia amoris, Oxford.Google Scholar
Green, C. M. C. (1996) ‘Terms of Venery: Ars amatoria I’, TAPA 126, 221–63.Google Scholar
Green, P. (1982) Ovid, the erotic poems, New York.Google Scholar
Habinek, T. (1998) The politics of Latin literature: Writing, identity, and empire in Ancient Rome, Princeton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hemelrijk, E. (1999) Matrona docta: educated women in the Roman élite from Cornelia to Julia Domna, London.Google Scholar
Henderson, J. (1991/1992) ‘Wrapping up the case: reading Ovid, Amores 2.7 (8) I’, MD 27CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henderson, J. (1991) 37–88 and ‘Wrapping up the case: reading Ovid, Amores 2.7 (8) II’, MD 28 (1992) 27–83.Google Scholar
Henderson, J. (2006) ‘In Ovid with bed (Ars II and III)’, in Gibson, , Green, , and Sharrock, , 77–95.Google Scholar
Hollis, A. (1977) Ovid, Ars amatoria book 1, Oxford.Google Scholar
Holzberg, N. (2006) ‘Staging the reader response: Ovid and his “contemporary audience” in Ars and Remedia’, in Gibson, , Green, , and Sharrock, , 40–53.Google Scholar
James, S. L. (1997) ‘Slave-rape and female silence in Ovid's love poetry’, Helios 24, 60–76.Google Scholar
James, S. L. (2003) Learned girls and male persuasion: gender and reading in Roman love elegy, Berkeley.Google Scholar
Janka, M. (1997) Ovid: Ars amatoria Buch 2, Kommentar, Heidelberg.Google Scholar
Kennedy, D. (2000) ‘Bluff your way in didactic: Ovid's Ars amatoria and Remedia amoris’, Arethusa 33.2, 159–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kennedy, D. (2006)‘Vixisset Phyllis, si me foret usa magistro: erotodidaxis and intertextuality’, in Gibson, , Green, , and Sharrock, , 54–74.Google Scholar
Kenney, E. J. (1995) P. Ouidi Nasonis Amores, Medicamina faciei femineae, Ars amatoria, Remedia amoris. Iteratis curis, Oxford.Google Scholar
Labate, M. (1984) L'arte di farsi amare. Modelli culturali e progetto didascalico nell'elegia ovidiana, Pisa.Google Scholar
Mayer, R. (2003) ‘Persona<l> problems. The literary persona in antiquity revisited’, MD 50, 55–80.Google Scholar
Miller, J. F. (1994) ‘Apostrophe, aside and the didactic addressee: poetic strategies in Ars amatoria III’, MD 31, 231–1.Google Scholar
Myerowitz, M. (1985) Ovid's games of love, Detroit.Google Scholar
Myerowitz-Levine, M. (2006) ‘Ovid's evolution’, in Gibson, , Green, and Sharrock, , 252–75.Google Scholar
O'Hara, J. (2004) review of Volk (2002),CJ 98, 456–8.Google Scholar
Pianezzola, E. (1991) Ouidio, L'arte di amare. A cura di Emilio Pianezzola. Commento di Gianluigi Baldo, Lucio Cristante, Emilio Pianezzola, Milan.Google Scholar
Prince, G. (1971) ‘Notes toward a categorization of fictional “narratees”’, Genre 4, 100–106.Google Scholar
Prince, G. (1973) ‘Introduction à l'étude du narrataire’, Poetique 14, 178–96, (trans, and repr. as Prince (1980)).Google Scholar
Prince, G. (1980) ‘Introduction to the study of the narratee’, in Tompkins, J. (ed.) Reader-response criticism: from formalism to post-structuralism, Baltimore, 7–25 (trans. Mariner, Francis).Google Scholar
Prince, G. (1985) ‘The narratee revisited’, Style 19, 299–303.Google Scholar
Prince, G. (1987) A dictionary of narratology, Lincoln.Google Scholar
Romano, A. (1972) ‘Ovid's Ars amatoria, or The art of outmanoeuvering the partner’, Latomus 31, 814–19.Google Scholar
Sharrock, A. (1994a) Seduction and repetition in Ovid's Ars amatoria II, Oxford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sharrock, A. (1994b) ‘Ovid and the politics of reading’, MD 34, 97–122.Google Scholar
Sharrock, A. (1998) ‘Haud mollia iussa: response to Roy Gibson’, in Atherton, 99–115.Google Scholar
Sharrock, A. (2002) ‘Ovid and the discourses of love: the amatory works’, in Hardie, P. (ed.) The Cambridge companion to Ovid, Cambridge, 150–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sharrock, A. (2005) ‘Those who can, teach: Ovid's Ars amatoria and contemporary instructional writing’, in Horster, M. and Reitz, C. (eds.) Wissensvermittlung in dichterischer Gestalt, Stuttgart, 243–63.Google Scholar
Sharrock, A. (2006) ‘Love in parentheses: digression and narrative hierarchy in Ovid's erotodidactic poems’, in Gibson, , Green, , and Sharrock, , 23–39.Google Scholar
Verducci, F. (1980) ‘The contest of rational libertinism and imaginative license in Ovid's Ars amatoria’, Pacific Coast Philology 15.2, 29–39.Google Scholar
Volk, K. (2002) The poetics of Latin didactic: Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, Manilius, Oxford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Volk, K. (2006) ‘Ars amatoria romana: Ovid on love as a cultural construct’, in Gibson, , Green, and Sharrock, , 235–51.Google Scholar
Watson, P. (2002) ‘Praecepta amoris: Ovid's didactic elegy’, in Boyd, B. Weiden (ed.) Brill's companion to Ovid, Leiden, 141–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wheeler, A. L. (1910–1911) ‘Erotic teaching in Roman elegy and the Greek sources’, CP 5, 440–50 and 6, 56–77.Google Scholar
Wright, E. (1984) ‘Profanum sunt genus: the poets of the Ars amatoria’, PQ 63, 1–15.Google Scholar
Wyke, M. (2002) The Roman mistress, Oxford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar