Phaethon

Phaethon bridges Books 1-2 in Ovid, and also in the OM. In the moralizations, the OM also makes important claims and warnings about bad readers of great texts (or other primary sources) and the dangers of bad scholarship, a sort of false counsel that leads others astray. We’ll focus today on understanding this tale in relationship to the illuminations (i.e., painted illustrations) included in the Rouen OM manuscript (abbreviated in medieval scholarship as “MS”) and the relationship between text and image, as well as thematic ties to Dante’s Inferno with the tale of Ulysses.