Special Collections
Book of the Month, February 2010
P. Ovidii Nasonis … Metamorphoses oder Verwandlung
Ovid; trans. by Johan Spreng
Frankfurt: Georg Raben, Sigmund Feyrabend and Weigand Hanen Erben, 1564
Bb [Ovid] SR
Few Latin works appealed to a wider public or had more effect on later literature than Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Completed in 8 A.D., the poem circulated freely in Rome during the early empire, lost popularity when Christianity gained ground, but spread widely during the High Middle Ages. There are records of it having been used as a school textbook in eleventh-century Germany and twelfth-century France; it influenced Chaucer, Gower, Chrétien de Troyes and Dante among others, and Ariosto, Montaigne and Cervantes were among its later admirers. It first appeared in print in about 1472.
The work comprises some 250 stories, divided into fifteen books. The tales link adventure and romance. They are arranged chronologically from the Creation to Julius Caesar. They are loosely linked by the theme of transformation: of chaos transformed to harmony; of animals turned to stone; of people becoming trees, animals, stones or stars.
Metamorphoses was first translated into German by Albrecht von Halberstatt in the thirteenth century and is now available via sixteenth-century editions. Johan Spreng (1524-1601), a Meistersinger and notary from Augsburg, was the second of two new sixteenth-century German translators, following Johannes Postius (1537-1597). In addition to translating Ovid into rhyming couplets, Spreng translated the Aeneid and the Iliad into German.
This edition has a woodcut illustration at the beginning of each book. The edition is not in Adams’s Catalogue of Books Printed on the Continent of Europe, 1501-1600, in Cambridge Libraries, nor are any copies recorded on COPAC or WorldCat. This copy was formerly in the library of the Royal Society, to which it was donated by Henry Howard, Duke of Norfolk (1628-1684).
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