Heroides ventriloquism in the Italian Baroque

Abstract

Sixteen-hundred years after the Roman elegist Ovid’s ‘Heroides’ (c15–5 BCE) articulated the lament of abandoned heroines (and one historical figure: Sappho) writing and responding to their heroes, several male baroque poets re-ventriloquised Ovid’s epistolary interlocutors. Leading seventeenth-century literary presence Giambattista Marino was himself an early exponent of the form, which he describes as “imitated from Ovid” (“imitate da Ovidio”) in his ‘Lira’ (1614 CE). My research considers why and how these little-studied Seicento texts—produced by Marinist circles affiliated with the libertine Venetian Accademia degli Incogniti—reinterpret Ovid’s ventriloquism, and what this indicates about seventeenth-century attitudes toward gendered writing. A largely overlooked niche in the reception of Ovid’s unique elegies, many of these baroque poems are yet to be examined by scholars. My close readings compare the new ‘updates’ to popular early modern Latin and vernacular Italian ‘Heroides’ editions of the seventeenth century, revealing the significance of Ovid's collection for the dominance of elite men in Marinist literary culture.