Abstract

Six Latin Pyramus and Thisbe poems based on Ovid's telling of the story in Metamorphoses 4, 55–166, have been preserved from the Middle Ages. Although of scant literary merit, these texts yield, on close examination, a surprisingly vivid picture of the environment in which they were written — the medieval classroom. Moreover, in spite of their lack of literary quality, these six poems appear to represent a school practice whose significance went far beyond the confines of the school itself, leaving its mark on the literature of its own day and of succeeding centuries. The following discussion concentrates on the first of these aspects, but will also attempt to show several ways in which the Pyramus and Thisbe tradition affected the telling of other love stories