Promotionsprojekt: The long “afterlife” of the poet from Sulmona: Ovidian female typologies in the poetry of Ausonius, Claudian and Venantius Fortunatus

My proposed research project focusses on Late Antiquity, develops further the themes I initially explored in my MA Thesis, mentioned above, and is entitled ‘The long “afterlife” of the poet from Sulmona: Ovidian female typologies in the poetry of Ausonius, Claudian and Venantius Fortunatus’. My project aims at examining in a systematic way Ovid’s Fortleben in the poetic literary production of Late Antiquity, especially in the works of Ausonius, of Claudian and in a selection of poems by Venantius Fortunatus; a particular point of view in my analysis will be the fortune and impact of Ovidian female typologies in the literature of Spätantike. The main aim of the investigation is to study in great depth the specific features of the relevant literary corpora, which will be discussed either within the system of the generic categories to which they primarily belong—in the case of ‘heterogeneous’ texts with reference to the category of genera mixta, a category very popular in the literature of Late Antiquity—or exclusively. My approach to the corpus, therefore, will entail the use of traditional textual-philological criteria but also methods of a linguistic, rhetorical, stylistic, comparative and contrasting character. My second objective in the proposed project is to discuss at greater length the Ovidian hypotexts, which, through their subtle vocabulary or through the ideological significance of their assimilated aspects of style or of the analogous ‘situation’ in which they are being reformulated, create in the readers a feeling of reassurance based on their knowledge of the existing literary tradition; in other words, the late-antique poet often addresses himself to a lector intendens, that is, an erudite reader who is sufficiently aware of the nexus of the intertextual, intratextual and intergeneric references that are provided to him or her. Finally, a section of the project will be dedicated to the ‘form’ of the Ovidian female typologies that comes as a result of their late-antique re-appropriation. I will distinguish between the literary ‘afterlife’ of mythical heroines and the ‘afterlife’ of fictitious images of femininity or the ‘afterlife’ of historically attested female figures, although these last ones have not yet been fully dissociated, within the poetic structure of the reception, from the stereotype of the persona ficta. This final aspect of my research will allow me not only to delineate the different ways in which the literary models discussed in the project were re-codified through the centuries but also to retrace the various ‘interpretative effects’ which resulted during the period of time in question from the variations of female typologies in literature. In this way, my study will enrich the knowledge of the social history of the period under discussion and it will also shed light, although only briefly, from an anthropological perspective, on the contact between diverse cultural spheres, including those of paganism and Christianity, in which the corpora under discussion and their hypotexts have significantly and effectively co-existed.