Exploiting Ovid:

Allegorizing Ovid was a popular activity during the middle ages, partly because it gave men license to read and write about sex and violence, often in abhorrent shapes, and partly because their remarks about pagan texts would not be subject to the kinds of scrutiny routinely given to commentaries on the Bible. Such license sometimes produced ingenious responses, showing the extremes to which some medieval imaginations were able to race, revealing as well something about the peculiar opinions, prejudices, tastes, and needs of the commentators and their audiences.

Allegorizing Arthurian material provided some of the same satisfactions, and the Vulgate Arthurian Cycle certainly offers some imaginative work with sex and violence, but the characters themselves are not constantly engaged in transactions with divinities who transform them utterly. The stories in the Gesta Romanorum show some of the same limitations of the Arthurian material, although occasionally, as Thomas Mann reminded us by writing The Holy Sinner, a saint's life can produce some truly strange resonances. For the most part, however, the stories in the Gesta Românorum too often show their musty origins in the limited imaginations that produce legal puzzles.

No other secular text, then, can match the opportunities for ingenious, even excessive interpretations offered by the Metamorphoses. Not every writer, however, took full advantage of this license for free-play. John of Garland, for example, in his scarcely penetrable thirteenth‑century rhetorical handbook, the Intequmenta Ovidii, produced a series of belated Chartrian exercises that do little more than demonstrate his academic competence(1). In the fourteenth century, John Ridevale's range of responses to classical myth was severely restricted by his desire to read almost everything in bonum; he offers cannibalism, for example, as an example of caritas feeding on its own deeds, and castration as an exclusively positive act, reprimere voluptatem veneream, invoking Aristotle, Augustine, and Cicero to support his reading(2).

Earlier in the fourteenth century, however, an anonymous Franciscan produced 70,000 lines of octosyllabic French couplets whose range, absurdity, and subtlety represent the furthest limits to which Ovid's Metamporphoses might drive a medieval poet(3). Since Ovid's own Latin text offers little more than 12,000 hexameters, the nearly six‑fold length of the ovide moralisé is the most obvious formal symptom of expansion, if not excess, that presents itself. To achieve such a level of production, however, the anonymous Old French poet called upon other readers of Ovid, like the Third Vatican Mythographer and John of Garland; he also added other narrative material, as well as material, or routines, that derive not from exegetical practice, but from a tradition variously labeled as diatribe, complaint, or satire. The result, then, is a work that participates in more than one genre, although it can have, for a pious Christian, ostensibly only one purpose(4).

That purpose can be found in this description, made in the fourteenth‑century, as part of a post‑mortem inventory of its owner's property, of a copy of the ovide moralisé:

Un grant romans, couvert de cuir vermeil, des fables d'ovide qui sunt ramene(e)z a moralite de la mort de Jesus Christ(5).

To the compiler of the inventory, then, the author of the ovide moralisé had devoted himself to the task of converting all Ovidian fables into allegories of the Incarnation, which is, presumably, the only 'metamorphosis' in which Christians may legitimately be interested. In the process of working out these conversions, however, he managed to perform other tasks as well, producing lengthy digressions, sometimes in the mode of satire or complaint. The result is a work whose genre is not immediately evident, but whose outline corresponds roughly to what Northrop Frye called a Menippean satire(6), since the poet not only translates, paraphrases, and allegorizes Ovid's text, but also "stuffs" it with materials from other poems by Ovid, by Chretien de Troyes, as well as with passages from the Ilias latina, the Roman de Thebes, and elsewhere.

When Fulgentius describes her response to him, she again makes clear the connection between the activity she is encouraging him to perform and satire:

et quatenus nostra satyra lascivienti verborum rore percussit vadatumque to sui retinet amoris

inlecebra...

as my Satire has sprayed you with a wanton dew of words and the allure of love holds you prisoner(8).

At least three meanings of "satire" are functional in the ovide moralisé. In addition to the Menippean form discussed by Frye and Bakhtin, the conventional meaning of satire as diatribe and complaint clearly applies, as does the less frequent use that seems to derive from the connection between satire and satyr.

Ann Moss refers to the tendency of the ovide moralisé to participate in the second meaning of satire when she speaks of the "tendency to turn tropological interpretation into satire of social estates."(9) The kind of diatribe in which the poet of the ovide moralis6 engages corresponds to what John of Garland, whose Integumenta was the source(10) of a number of passages in the ovide moralisé, described when he insisted, in his Morale Scolarium, that he, like Horace, was writing, in an innovative tone, not bitterly personal, but correctively general satire:

Scribo novam satiram, set sic ne seminet iram,

Iram deliram, letali vulnere diram,

Nullus dente mali lacerabitur in speciali,

Immo metro tali ludet stilus in generali. (p. 187)

I write new satire, not to sow anger, wrathful with deadly wounds; no particular human being will be lacerated by the tooth of evil, but the restrained stylus will play generally(11).

In speaking of his intentions to produce a satiric attack on modern times, John of Garland also has Ovid's Metamorphoses in mind:

Fit, modo Nasonis, mutatio vi rationis,

Sub galee conis furit hic feritate leonis. (p. 197)

The change comes about, in Naso's manner, by the power of reason, under the helmet's cone it rages with the ferocity of a lion ... John offers a gloss that makes his intentions clearer, particularly in respect to metamorphosis:

Dicit auctor quod tanta malitia regnat in mundo quod homines possunt dici mutari secundum Ovidium in lupos et in alia bruta animalia, per proprietates pessimas quas habent moderni, seviores et crudeliores sunt lupis, etc.

The author says that such evil rules in the world that men, according to Ovid, may be changed into wolves and other brute animals, through the worst qualities that men today have; they are more wrathful and cruel than wolves, etc...

Examples of passages that offer general categories rather than specific individuals as objects of diatribe or complaint can be found passim in the ovide moralisé. In 1.1568‑1614, after several allegorizations of the encounter between Jupiter and Lycaon, the poet provides an attack on those who rob the poor, and who sell justice; eventually, his analysis of the story of the prophetess Ocyrrhoe, in II. 3223‑3300, leads to an attack on clerics interested in fame or material gain; in II. 4246ff., the story of the treacherous Aglauros leads to an attack on religious hypocrites, as does the story of Narcissus and Echo, in III. 1474ff. The story of the Pierides leads him to a lengthy disquisition on the superiority of philosophers to poets, in V.2705f. Many other passages, some not so clearly marked off as cadenzas, occur throughout the poem, often directed at Jews and women(12).

The attacks on women are related to the third use of satire in the poem, which involves its association, partly through its proposed etymological derivation from the name of the god Saturn, with time, chaos, violence, and sexuality. John of Garland plays with "satire" in his remarks on Saturn(13):

Saturnus satur est annus, saturatio primi

Temporis. Huic hostis filius eius erat.

Tempus quod sequitur secuisse virilia patris

Dicimus inque maris precipitasse chaos.

Tempus Saturnus, ubertas mentula, proles

Posteritas, venter est mare, spuma Venus.

Saturn is the full year, the fullness of the first time. His own son was his enemy. The time that follows we say cut off the genitalia of the father and threw them into the chaos of the sea. Saturn is time, the phallus is fertility, children are posterity, the sea is the stomach, and the foam is Venus.

The elements of time, chaos and sexuality, isolated and identified by John of Garland with Saturn (and elsewhere with Chronos and Tiresias(14) as well) are certainly dominant elements in Ovid's Metamorphoses. John Fyler(15) suggests as much when he describes Ovid as a "deconstructionist," destroying genres, and forms, supporting a vision of the world as chaotic, random.

Satire's complex, radical concern with instinctual, irrational impulses, and its connection with Saturnalian license, then, combine with the provocative material offered by Ovid's Metamorphoses to provide a playground more expansive than that offered by any other classical text in the middle ages(16).

The poet of the ovide moralisé was not the last medieval writer drawn by exegetical and satiric impulses to Ovid's Metamorphoses; later in the 14th century, Pierre Bersuire devoted the fifteenth book of his Reductorium morale to summarizing and allegorizing in Latin prose the Metamorphoses. Although the Latin prose version is much shorter and less elaborate than the Old French poem, which Bersuire claims not to have known until he composed a second version of his own work(17), a comparison of what Bersuire and the anonymous Franciscan did with some of the Ovidian matter should help to reveal the unique nature of the accomplishment of the poet of the ovide moralisé.

Such a comparison has been made before. One hundred years ago, in a survey of the uses of Ovid in the fourteenth century, Gaston Paris sought to point out where Bersuire borrowed from the French poet, unconcerned with the possibility that differences between the two writers might reflect different purposes, temperaments, and audiences. Although the two writers share some notions, particularly in the objects of their vituperation, the two texts reveal widely different temperaments, with the French poet more encyclopedic, extravagant, tolerant, absurd(18), and perhaps even proto‑Rabelaisian, while the Latin writer, although he shares with his predecessor a penchant for attacking Jews, ecclesiastics, laymen, simoniacs, chasers after benefices, usurers, incompetent preachers, bishops, venal officials,

princes, and governors(19), generally tends to reduce potentially rich ambiguities to univocal pieties(20).

In both texts the authors modulate through several modes: translating, paraphrasing, allegorizing, and denouncing. To hold all of these activities together in a single, coherent fashion was not an easy task, particularly since the purpose -- relating all of the transformations in Ovid's text to the mystery of the Incarnation -- remained doctrinally invariable(21). In the course of these activities, the Ovidian characters and incidents received, within the same text, a series of interpretations each of which might contradict the previous one, since the allegorizers did not require that Ovidian figures establish and remain consistent characters(22). In offering allegorical interpretations of passages from the Bible, medieval theologians generally try to establish levels of allegory as running parallel to and reinforcing each other; in reading the Bible, they did not generally find that one level contradicts another(23).

Certainly they understood the potential ambiguity of elements in the phenomenal world, and were able to interpret in bonum and in malum, finding the negative and positive significance of an apple, a mountain, or a tree; Hrabanus Maurus provides ample evidence of the technique (PL 111). However, they could not safely offer both a positive and a negative reading of Abraham, Moses, Christ, and major figures from the Old and particularly from the New Testament. Occassionally, however, they slip, and violate Jerome's warning against a tropological exegesis that does violence to the literal sense of a passage(24).

Both the author of the ovide moralisé and Bersuire show no feelings of responsibility towards establishing the unity of the pagan text they are tearing apart, although each shows some apprehension about the activity he is performing, and both propose that their work be considered analogous to that of a Biblical exegete. The opening lines of the ovide moralisé offer a partial justification for what follows:

Se l'escripture ne me ment,

Tout est pour nostre enseignement

Quanqu'il a es livres escript,

Soient bon ou mal li escript.

Late in the poem, in the process of defending the task of interpreting Pythagoras' prophecy in the fifteenth book of the Metamorphoses, the Franciscan again defends his task:

Bon sens et acordable a voir

Puet l'en en ceste fable metre,

Qui bien set exposer la letre.

Ensi est la Sainte Escripture

En pluisors leus trouble et obscure,

Et samble fable purement. (15. 2546‑51)

In these passages, the author seems to be committing exactly the sort of error attacked by Wycliffe in 1378, when, in cataloguing his opponents' errors in De veritate sacrae Scripturae, he resisted the notion that parts of the Scripture are false(25).

Bersuire also finds it necessary to justify reading fables by invoking Biblical fables ‑‑ Judges ix.8, and Ezechiel xvii.3 ‑‑ as well as Augustine contra mendacium, as Minnis points out. However, "... Bersuire has, as it were, twisted the waxen nose of his authority in a different direction; Augustine was defending the truth of Holy Scripture, and certainly not interested in justifying pagan fables" (p. 143) .

Having established, at least to his own satisfaction, sufficient justification to continue, the author of the ovide moralisé proceeds to carry out his task. In the course of this activity, he offers, in a number of cases, both a positive and a negative significance for the same figure or event.

Juno, in Book IV, for example, may represent wealth(26), the mother of all vices, as well as Christ, descending to hell (4981‑5115). In effect, she may represent both Mammon and Christ. In VI. 1775ff., however, as the enemy of Latona, who is true religion, Juno becomes "li bobans dou monde" (1780), whose desire, then, is to destroy true religion. Bersuire, on the other hand, uncomfortable with powerful women, and therefore most uncomfortable with the most powerful woman, relates the story (p. 81) of Juno's descent to hell very briefly, and makes nothing at all of it. Although Bersuire allegorizes Latona positively, as scripture and faith, he does not offer any significance for Juno in the story. Thus he avoids giving her any positive or negative significances in these two instances(27).

Bersuìre's tendency to suppress female figures is also evident in the story of the three daughters of Minyeias. For the poet of the ovide moralisé (IV. 2448‑2785), the three Minyeides (Met IV 389‑415) may represent antithetical qualities: they may represent either three kinds of concupiscence, or three virtues. In his response to Book Four of the Metamorphoses, Bersuire mentions them, but neglects to offer allegorical interpretations for them, choosing instead, to devote his attention to a line that one of them, Leuconöe, offers as a praeteritio:

nec loquor, ut quondam naturae iure novato

ambiguus fuerit modo vir, modo femina Sithon.

Nor will I tell how once Sithon, the natural laws reversed, lived of changing sex, now woman and now man(28).

Although the poet of the ovide moralisé expands Ovid's two lines into eight, his negative interpretation of the figure of Sithon is focused only upon the shameful passivity of the feminine condition:

Mes trop est la fable commune,

Si vouse en diroie bien une

Comment Siton contre nature

Diversifiot sa figure,

Si c'une hore est horns, autre feme.

De grante honte et de grant diffame

Et de vilte s'entremetoit,

Qu'or actis, or passis estoit. (IV. 1968‑75)

When Bersuire allegorizes this two-line reference, he provides several more negative qualities for women:

Scython fuit quidam puer quem Iuppiter mutavit in foeminam ita quod ex tunc ambigue fuerit naturae: quia nunc erat foemina nunc masculus: ita quod nesciebatur de eo utrum debeat homo an mulier reperiri. Tales sunt duplices & varii qui nihil firmitatis aut fidelitatis habentes nunc in unam figuram, nunc in aliam mutantur: ita quod ubi masculi id est boni & firmi creduntur & fortes & constantes: foeminae id est molles & defectabiles inveniuntur sicut patet de falsis amicis.

Scython was a boy whom Jupiter changed to a female, that he might thenceforth be of a double nature; sometimes he was female, sometimes male. No one could tell whether he was a man or a woman. Such are the duplicitous and unreliable, who have nothing of stability and faithfulness in them, but who change from one shape to another. Thus they are thought to be good and steadfast, but are discovered to be weak and spineless, as is clear in the case of false friends.

Bersuire's antifeminism provides the major distinction between him and the poet of the ovide moralisé. Although both writers participate in the anti-feminine tradition, Bersuire is more relentless in the matter.

In a number of passages, all of which involve sexuality, and some of which have no basis in Ovid's Metamorphoses, the poet of the ovide moralisé shows an interest in sexuality that is closer to Ovid than to Saint Augustine. The description of Pasiphae's attitude towards the bull (VIII.617‑986), for example, disturbed DeBoer's sense of decorum, and Paris' remark (p. 518) about the depiction of Priapus at the marriage of Thetis and Peleus suggests that the medieval poet's attitudes towards sexuality were not congruent with late nineteenth‑century decorum. That Bersuire supresses this material suggests that his fourteenth‑century sensibility was closer to DeBoer and to Paris than to his own near contemporary.

Both writers, however, were capable of offering antithetical interpretations of the same figure, as well as for the same act(29). In the case of Apollo chasing Daphne, however, Bersuire shows a greater tolerance of opposing

interpretations than the poet of the ovide moralisé. In the case of Apollo chasing Diana, however, Bersuire shows a greater tolerance of opposing interpretations than the poet of the ovide moralisé. For Bersuire, Daphne fleeing Apollo first represents the Christian soul fleeing the Devil, but the the laurel tree into which she changes becomes Christ's cross, and Phoebus becomes a figure for Christ (p. 41). The poet of the ovide moralisé, however, offers several interpretation of Daphne, each of which insists upon her purity, so that eventually she becomes a figure for Mary (I.3065ff.). Apollo is a negative figure in none of the French poet's readings of the story(30).

When Jove rapes Ino, Bersuire offers the god first as a figure for mundi principes et raptores, then as the devil to Ino's anima. Juno, however, then becomes the church, bride of Christ (p. 43), and Ino, as the cow given to her, becomes the Christian people given by Christ/Jove. For Bersuire, then, both Apollo and Jove may represent either the devil or Christ.

The French poet, however, sympathetically sees Ino as a pure young girl (I. 3905ff.) who is forced into a life of prostitution; eventually she, like Mary of Egypt, is saved, proving that sinners are salvageable.

In some instances the French poet and the Latin exegete are not very far apart. For the story of Actaeon and Diana, for example, Bersuire produces a remarkable series of interpretations, beginning with an attack on the expenses of hunting(31). (pp. 64 ff) Actaeon may be a usurer or Christ; if he is a usurer, then Diana is avarice, unwilling to be seen in the nudity of her vice. As Christ, however, Actaeon (p. 66) devoured by dogs is Christ devoured by the Jews. The transformation into a stag is Christ's incarnation; unrecognized, he is devoured by his own people.

The Franciscan's response parallels that of Bersuire; he too begins with an expression of horror at the expense of keeping dogs:

Estre pot que de chacerie

S'entremist aucuns damoisiaus,

Qui tant ama chiens et oisiaus

Et put de son propre chete,

Qu'il le mistrent a povrete. (III. 573‑578)

He concludes this part of his response with a practical warning:

Nulz ne puet a bon chief venir

De maintenir mesnie oiseuse,

Qui ne profite et est cousteuse:

Au mains i pert il son avoir.

There is, however, a second, more significant significance: Plus noble et de meillor sentence (605); the story of Adam's fall, in brief, follows, leading to Christ's taking on human

form. Diana then becomes;

...la Deite

Qui regnoit en la Trinite (635‑636)

Li Ju'f, li Pharisien,

Li Sarrasin et li pa'en,

Com fol et musart despisoient

Les Prophetes, qui ce disoient,

Et traictoient vilainenment. (111.2771‑77)

Christ himself, then, is figured forth, in this interpretation, by Liber, perhaps suggested by John 15.1‑7, "I am the true vine, etc."(34) Pentheus/Christ persecuting Bacchus/Christ apparently generates no anxiety for the poet of the ovide moralisé, who reads and interprets from moment to moment.

Bersuire's response to the Theban material is far more constrained than that of the poet of the ovide moralisé. When Tiresias strikes the copulating snakes (pp. 69‑69) he becomes a symbol of the Jews denying the two natures of Christ; his metamorphosis into a woman represents a reduction to imperfection, and his seven‑year tenure as a woman represents per universitatem tem‑. Thus the figure of Tiresias enables him to kill two birds with one stone, identifying women and Jews as negative significations:

Iste Tyresias significat populum iudaicum qui vir a principio fuit id est virtuosus & bonus: Sed quia serpentes invicem coeuntes id est duplicem christi naturam divinam scilicet & humanum insimul iunctam per fidem et credulitatem recipere noluit: immo ipsos percussit & contempsit (Percussit enim naturam divinam trinitatem non recipiendo & filium a patre non distinguendo. Percussit humanam naturam ipsam in cruce occidendo & vituperiis afficiendo) Ideo dico quod iste Tyresias id est populus iudaeorum a virili conditione id est a fidei virtute & perfectione cecidit:& in naturam ., foeminam id est in gentem imperfectam & instabilem mutatus fuit... (p. 68)

Tiresias stands for the Jewish people, originally good and virtuous, but unable to accept the conjoined serpents, that is the two natures, divine and human, of Christ, simultaneously joined through faith and belief, but instead struck and condemned him (they attacked his divine nature by refusing to accept the Trinity; they attacked his human nature by killing him on the cross and heaping abuse upon him). Tiresias stands for the Jewish people, fallen from the virtue and perfection of belief into a female condition, that is, they were changed into an imperfect, unstable race. His second encounter with the snakes represents the conversion of the Jews, which, of course, according to this scheme of things, will occur at the end of time. In the course of his exegesis, Bersuire also draws analogies with Moses' encounter with the serpent and the rod (Exodus IV), and he borrows from the Third Vatican Mythographer to offer Tiresias as a figure for eternal time(35), where the seer's change of sexes signifies the change of seasons.

Bersuire's initial analysis of the Dionysian material is far from ingenious. In response to Pentheus' predicament, Bersuire first offers practical advice from Ecclesiastes: don't antagonize people who have drunk too much, in convivio vini non argue proximum: & non despicias eum in iocunditate illius (p. 72). His final comment on the incident involves eyesight and its limitations; eyes did the Jews no good, since they saw Christ and yet had no faith in him. Bersuire is clearly far less interested in the Dionysian material than his Franciscan predecessor, and is far more persistent in pursuing his case against Jews and women.

However, he does then proceed to interpret the story of Bacchus and the sailors positively, as he had done, following Hrabanus Maurus, in the De formis figuriscrue deorum, the introduction to the fifteenth book of the Reductorium (Engels I., p. 27), where he offers a brief sketch of the Graeco‑Roman gods. There, after a series of readings of the god of wine in malum, Bersuire offers some readings in bonum, interpreting Bacchus as crratia dei, fervor, spiritus; his boy‑like character stands for purity, his nudity for truth, and his female‑like quality for piety. These are the qualities that he weaves into his interpretation of the story of Bacchus and the sailors:

(22) "That these interpretations are inconsistent with each other does not seem to matter," Moss points out, oR. cit, p. 25. In "The Use of Exempla in the Policraticus of John of Salisbury," pp. 207‑261 of The World of John of Salisbury, ed. Michael Wilks, Oxford, 1984, Peter yon Moos argues that John of Salisbury arranges his authorities with a similar disregard of the intentions of the authors whose phrases and sentences he borrows, following the principle that "everything written is exploitable." (p. 247)

(23) See de Lubac, ,off. cit., part one, volume 2, pp. 643‑656, "L'unité du quadruple sens." Ghisalberti, however, points out that Arnulf of Orleans proposed to offer three, and John of Garland four levels of interpretation ‑‑ natural, spiritual, moral and magical ‑‑ but the results of their efforts do not correspond to their declared intentions (Integumenta, pp. 35‑36).

(24) A good example of this kind of transaction occurs in the 12th century interpretations of David's passion for Bathsheba, which offer David as a figure of Christ, Bathsheba as the church, and Uriah as the devil. The interpretations and the subsequent corrections and adjustments made in the 13th and 14th centuries are described by A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, London, 1984, pp. 104.

(25) See Minnis, p. 144, for the arguments against other than literal reading of the Bible, and for the attack on using falsehoods to teach truths.

(26) Fulgentius (Helm, pp. 38‑39) had made the connection with wealth, though not with vice, and the Third Vatican Mythographer (Bode, p. 167) had included this connection, without a negative judgment, among his explanations.

(27) Inexplicably, John of Garland never mentions Juno at all in his Intequmenta.

(28) Ovid, metamorphoses, edited and translated by F. J. Miller, London, 1928, I. 198‑199.

(29) In this narrow, purely formal sense, they are "dialogic," in a sense that resembles the sense in which Bakhtin uses the word.

(30) DeBoer (I. p. 56) points out the poet's unclear handling of the allegory at this point.

(31) A traditional interpretation of the story that goes back through the Third Vatican Mythographer (G. H. Bode, Scriptores Rerum Mvthicarum Latini Tres, Cellis, 1834, pp. ‑198‑199) to Fulgentius, Mvthographies III.iii. For attacks on hunting for the purposes of Martinian hagiography, see Peter Godman, Poets and Emperors: Frankish Politics and Carolingian Poetry, Oxford, 1987, pp. 88‑89.

(32) The phrase may come from John of Garland's interpretation of Semele as corpus...dissolutum, (p. 48), or from the Third Vatican Mythographer (Bode, p. 246). Neither possible source has anything positive to say about this figure.

(33) An interpretation in accord with John of Garland's, Pentheus est studiosus homo (p. 50). The Third Vatican Mythographer (Bode, p. 246), following Fulgentius, offered no interpretion of Pentheus' significance.

(34) For further discussion of the background of the identification of Christ with Dionysius, see Florence M. Weinberg, The Wine and the Will: Rabelais' Bacchic Christianity, Detroit, 1972. M. A. Screech, in Rabelais, Ithaca, 1979, resists such an identification, choosing to interpret Bacchus only as "that spiritually liberating power of joyful wine" (p. 455).

(35) Tiresias ita ue "aestiva perennitas" interpretatur... (Bode, p. 169).

(36) Paris concludes his description of this series of interpretations with (p. 518): "I1 est impossible d'être plus absurde."

(37) My reading of these authors has emphasized some of the unintended consequences of their reading and writing. For a very fine consideration of the consciously intended achievements of the poet of the ovide moralisé, see Paule Demats, Fabula: trois études de mythographie antigue et médiévale, Geneva, 1973; pp. 61 ff. are devoted specifically to the French poem.