Vestigia de Ovídio em três biografias da obra De mulieribus claris de Giovanni Boccaccio

Abstract

In his catalogue On famous women (De mulieribus claris), written between 1361 and 1362, Giovanni Boccaccio explores the mythical Greco-Roman universe, portraying the life of some of its notable (clarae) female figures. Previous research on De mulieribus claris tends to be marked by a dichotomal trend, namely: pointing out in the biographies either a moralist (Christian) character or a “merely” literary one. Erudite “researches on sources” (Quellenforschungen) on the catalogue – which are usually associated to the second perspective – highlight, among other classical sources, the presence of the work of Ovid (43 B.C.-17 A.D.). The main objective of this article is to investigate how the poetry of the Roman author is alluded to in De mulieribus Claris, and to explore the dynamic effects of that presence in this catalogue. Here, references to Ovid’s text will be particularly appreciated – using elements of Intertextual theory applied to classical Letters – in some excerpts of three biographies of the De mulieribus, namely Thisbe (XIII), Medea (XVII) and Sappho (XLVII). The observation of the relation between ancient and modern authors’ texts gives us signs of the process of resignification of classical material in the Boccaccian work, in which the mythological element is reinterpreted within a Christian moral perspective, and is also part of a reference system that links Boccaccio to the great authors of Antiquity.