Transcript of Extended Interview with Kyle Gervais

Thanks for checking out the extended edition of our Coffee Break interview with Kyle Gervais, assistant professor of Classics at the University of Western Ontario! We discuss his new book, available now from MIP and TEAMS: John of Garland, Integumenta Ovidii: Text, Translation, and Commentary, talk about why the text is important and how best to use it for teaching, and end with the question MIP considers central to our mission: What does this text teach us about what it means to be human through the ages?

Transcript

MIP: Hi, everyone, and thanks for joining us for the very first of a series of brief conversations with MIP authors and editors. The goal of these kind of brief chats is to just have a short chat with an MIP author or editor and to go a little bit beyond the published book, find out more about what kind of challenges and rewards they had when they were working on it, stories that maybe didn't make it into the book, interesting things that they wish they could have talked about a little bit more, that kind of thing. So our first guest, and we're so excited to have him with us here, is Kyle Gervais, associate professor of Classics at the University of Western Ontario. And we are going to talk about his book, John of Garland, Integumenta Ovidii: Text, Translation, and Commentary. And this is published by Medieval Institute Publications and TEAMS, the Teaching Association for Medieval Studies in the Secular Commentary series. So thank you so much for joining us, and welcome Kyle!

Kyle Gervais: My pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.

MIP: Yeah. Can you, uh—just to start out, can you tell us a little bit about the book?

Kyle Gervais: Sure. Yeah. So the book is a... it's a new Latin text and English translation and explanatory notes on a thirteenth-century poem called the Integumenta Ovidii. That basically translates to Allegories on Ovid, and that means Ovid's Metamorphoses. It was written by John of Garland, he was a scholar and a teacher in Paris, when the university there was rising to its thirteenth century preeminence. Um, Ovid's Metamorphoses is full of fascinating Greek and Roman myths, and was taken seriously in the Middle Ages as a repository of valuable classical knowledge. But of course, the problem is that most of these pagan myths don't work well in a Christian context. So what John does is to draw on current trends of reading those myths allegorically. So for instance, the pagan story of Prometheus, who created humans by molding them out of clay, that's basically blasphemy if you believe the Christian God created the world. But what John tells us is that this myth is actually an allegory about a famous teacher named Prometheus, who molded the minds of his students and, in fact, imparted the light of heavenly knowledge into them. And so his poem is just full of these these really interesting and bizarre interpretations that I've been digging into.

MIP: Great, thank you so much. So why is John of Garland important? Or, I suppose another question you could answer is, why is this text important? Why is the Integumenta Ovidii important?

Kyle Gervais: Yeah, I mean, I think John himself is—he wrote a large variety of different texts, and many of them are getting modern critical editions. So I think we're all learning that he was a lot more important than we... than we used to think, but specifically about the Integumenta... I personally think it's worth reading, first of all, because it's a really impressive artistic and scholarly achievement. He's drawing on centuries of dense classical and medieval thinking. And he's dealing with Ovid's incredibly complex poem that still challenges readers today. But he's offering these really clever and often unexpected interpretations. And he's not just laying them out in prose, he's actually using fairly accomplished Latin verse. And then they're also worth reading because their interpretation of the Metamorphoses were very influential on later readers throughout the Middle Ages, up to the end of the Renaissance. We can find their influence in medieval England, Spain, France, Italy... Dante was reading the Metamorphoses through the lands of John's Integumenta... copies of the poem spread throughout Europe in manuscripts and printed books for centuries after his death.

MIP: Great. So we were talking a little bit earlier, and you mentioned that you kind of wanted to combine talking a little bit about something you learned or something unexpected you kind of came across when working on this book, and the challenges and rewards. You know, you also just mentioned that this was a very challenging text for readers, and that we're learning that John of Garland is maybe more important than he seemed to be before. So this all kind of seems to tie nicely together. Do you want to just talk about that whole nexus for a few minutes?

Kyle Gervais: Yeah, for sure. So, one of the challenges of so much medieval literature, and certainly of John, is just the basic meaning of these often very difficult Latin texts, and difficult because they were written to be difficult, but also because their textual transmission is difficult. So this is the first Latin text and English translation of the poem in about a century. And when I first started the project, I was just planning on doing an English translation of an existing Latin edition from the 1930s. But when I started on the project, I really quickly learned that that edition, and that's the one scholars have been drawing on for a century, it's just full of problems. And the editor really struggled to make sense of John's difficult Latin and the very messy manuscript tradition. So I ended up starting from scratch, and producing a brand new edition of the poem, drawing on readings of about two dozen manuscripts. And that, I think, obviously, was immensely challenging, but also really fun and rewarding. And I like to think that I've managed to significantly improve on that older edition itself. Yeah.

MIP: We got two for... well, probably not the price of one (giggles) because it was a lot of work to do those things! But planning on starting—planning to just have the translation, we... we got a really valuable resource out of this publication then because we got a totally new edition as well.

Kyle Gervais: Thanks. Yeah.

MIP: Great. So is there anything you were not able to include in the book but... but wish that you could have?

Kyle Gervais: Oh, yeah, I mean, a lot. I think... well, I mean, I'm reasonably happy with, with what I was able to squeeze into it, it was planned always to be a fairly short book. I think there's room for plenty more work on the poem. But I mean, really, one of the main goals of the book was to, to give a solid foundation for future scholarship to draw on. And that's what these editions and translations and commentaries are all about. I think I've successfully argued that the Latin of the poem is difficult and challenging, but it's not nonsense, as it's sometimes been thought before. And so I think there's more work to be done trying to find the sense in John's writing. I think as I said before, it's also quite impressive as a poem, and there's a lot of room for future work to treat it as a piece of literature to be analyzed. And I think especially, there's space for more work on the intellectual tradition that John is part of. His bookshelf was clearly huge. And I don't think I've identified every classical and medieval source that he's drawn on. So lots, lots still to do, for sure.

MIP: That's always one of the fun parts for me in talking to our authors is, you know, all academics understand there's always more to do. And there's always lots of stuff that is interesting and exciting, but maybe not—just can't fit into the that scope of that particular work.

Kyle Gervais: Yeah.

MIP: So it's always fun to find out what other things people were thinking about and writing about and and want to come back to later. So.

Kyle Gervais: Yeah. Well, and for me, I mean, this was my, this was my first really serious foray into medieval Latin. I'm trained as a classicist, so it was also just a huge learning experience on my part, and just, you know, every day was opening up a whole new world of, "Oh, I could spend, you know, a month going down this rabbit hole," or that rabbit hole, but you've got to kind of keep it focused. And so I think I'll probably do some of that future work I alluded to myself, but I think there's, there's room for lots of other scholars to tackle this stuff, too.

MIP: Yeah. And that's wonderful. So TEAMS books, as I said, are published by MIP and the Teaching Association for Medieval Studies. They're intended to be kind of student-friendly translations or editions, although many of them are also used for for high-level scholarly work, of course. But we, you know, they're encouraged for use in classrooms. So what kind of courses do you think would benefit from including this text in their reading lists?

Kyle Gervais: Yeah, so the, the wonderful thing about this poem is, it was written in the High Middle Ages, and it's very much a part of that medieval context. But it was also deeply engaged with the classical world, not just Ovid's Metamorphoses, but a bunch of late antique scholarship that was foundational for medieval scholarship. And then, as I said before, John's poem was itself massively influential on later readers of Ovid's Metamorphoses, and classical literature in general. And John, these allegories, he's very wide-ranging in the topics that he treats, so he explained these myths through the lens of literature, mythology, religion, science, medicine, art, there's a few more I'm sure I'm forgetting right now. So I think any course interested in the literary and intellectual history of the classical world, late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, I think they'd find something to learn from the Integumenta. And I think that this new Latin text, English translation, and notes should, should hopefully make that learning process easier than it has been before.

MIP: Yeah. It sounds... it sounds like a great resource for a lot of different classes, as you said, depending on, like, the theme that you're talking about, too, it sounds like you can kind of excerpt pieces, possibly.

Kyle Gervais: I think so. Oh, yeah. I mean, these... the other neat thing is, most of them are self-contained explanations of a couple lines of a given myth. So you know, if you're a... I mean, I approach this as a classicist... if you are in a classical mythology course and you're interested in the myth of Apollo and Daphne, John has four lines on that, right? And so that could be something that could be excerpted and say, here's sort of the medieval afterlife of that. Or if you're interested in the medieval understanding of, of... oh, gosh, he talks about urinary catheters, he talks about models of the universe, he talks about bile, botany, all sorts of things. You know, he's just all over the place in a really fascinating way. And so I think there's multiple points of entry into the poem.

MIP: Something for everyone (laughs).

Kyle Gervais: Yeah.

MIP: Great. So before we wrap up here, I would like to end each of these conversations the same way. It's kind of tying all of our publications back to our—our core mission. MIP is proud to take a—excuse me. Proud to take a stand for the Humanities, and books that we publish use literary, historical, and material sources and employ innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to what it has meant to be human throughout the ages. So what does this book teach us about what it meant to be human at the time and place that it was composed, or... what it means to be human now?

Kyle Gervais: That is a dangerous question to ask a scholar, because we will want to go on for hours...

MIP: (Laughs)

Kyle Gervais: ...but I'll try to keep it short. I think there are some things we can learn about humanity from John's poem. The first that repeatedly struck me, is this instinctive respect that he has for the wisdom of those that came before him. I mean, he... John is writing a poem about a poem that was written more than... more than a millennium before he was born. And he clearly thinks that it has some important things to say. But connected to that is, our equally instinctive desire to make the past meaningful for the present. So the allegories on Ovid's myths, that John gives us, they're really pretty bizarre. From a classical standpoint, I don't think Ovid would have made much sense of these. But, but they do an excellent job of articulating a vision of the world that would have been deeply meaningful for John and his medieval, contemporary Christian audience. And then finally—and I'll try not to go down a rabbit hole, but—I'm just so impressed by how he can make meaning out of limited information. So there's this part of the poem that I discuss in my introduction, where John gives a theory of the physical and mathematical relationships between the four elements, earth, water, air, and fire. And to a modern reader, the theory is just nonsense, in part because, of course, the universe isn't made up of four elements. But John and the scholars that he draws on, they were working without the benefit of any modern technology. And it's just remarkable how they were able to make this model of the universe that is completely wrong, but makes perfect sense to their understanding, and is completely internally coherent. I think it's amazing. It's, like, maybe a little bit scary... It makes me wonder what established truths today, we're going to be looking back on centuries from now and saying, "Well, that's not the way the world works." But, but, you know, you make meaning out of out of what you have. So that was really very interesting to me.

MIP: That is a great place to stop. Great answer for that last question. That's what I'm hoping to get out of this... this last question.

Kyle Gervais: Wonderful.

MIP: So thank you so much. Again, the book is John of Garland, Integumenta Ovidii: Text, Translation, and Commentary, by Kyle Gervais. So it's available now from MIP, in paperback, hardback, and a PDF ebook. So as we said, useful in lots of different classes, so take a look. I'll put a link to the book in the description below. So, thank you so much for being our first guest on these brief chats. And I definitely look forward to learning more about the book and seeing future work on it.

Kyle Gervais: You're welcome, it was a pleasure. Thanks.

Transcribed by Otter.ai

John of Garland, Integumenta Ovidii, edited and translated by Kyle Gervais

The renowned scholar-poet John of Garland wrote the Integumenta Ovidii (“Allegories on Ovid”) in early thirteenth-century Paris at a time of renewed interest in Classical Latin literature. In this short poem, John offers a series of dense, highly allusive allegories on various Greek and Roman myths in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The text is here edited and translated for the first time in 90 years, drawing on the evidence of over two dozen manuscripts. Comprehensive explanatory notes help readers to understand John’s condensed allegories in their medieval context. Textual notes discuss the various difficulties in the transmitted text of the poem, and offer several improvements on the texts of the older editions.

ISBN 978-1-58044-526-9 (paperback), 978-1-58044-527-6 (hardback), 978-1-58044-528-3 (PDF) © 2022

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