Keywords

Translations are part of gender history. Translation scholars have called attention to the consistency with which translations are associated with changes and mirror established value systems and prevailing ideologies.Footnote 1 A translator acts in a specific social situation and tailors the transferred text to its intended purpose, as well as to the cultural realities and social conditions of the intended readership. Historical translations of literature thus not only offer insights into the contributions men and women have made to accessing, imparting, and building knowledge, but also show how gender concepts have been reconfigured and adapted to the ideals of the target culture. Power-political structures are woven into translations, sometimes questioning male dominance, but more often adopting and underpinning it. Gender and sexual identities are not stable, as the translation scholar José Santaemilia points out in the introduction to the collective volume Gender, Sex and Translation (2015): “Certainly, the translation of gender or sex is not an innocent affair, and it involves not only a cross-cultural transfer but a cross-ideological one. […] A translation always adds something: ideology, political (in)correction, urgency or restraint, etc.”Footnote 2 This makes the combination of gender/sex studies and translation studies a fascinating exercise to examine how identity and desire are handled, legitimized, censured, sanctioned, or tabooed in translation discourses.

When translators fail to reflect on their own historical and cultural position, they misconstrue and even negate gender-specific power relations. In historical translations, we frequently encounter announcements to the effect that the source text has been reproduced in the target language without changes and as precisely as possible. As a rule, these statements of intent have been made by male translators who lived in patriarchal societies and took their privileged status for granted as something natural or God-given. They thus suggested the existence of a universal, objective, and gender-free translation ideal.Footnote 3 On the abstract, theoretical level, of course, one might want to distinguish between a translational ideal of loyalty to the source text and the interpretational conventions of a patriarchal society.Footnote 4 In actual translation practice, however, it is not possible to omit previous discourse formations. The perspective on a source text and its reformulation—its ‘rewriting’Footnote 5—is always shaped by the translator’s individual conception, social experiences, and cultural contexts. The male claim to translational loyalty merely veils hegemonial structures. The androcentric outlook is not identified as such, but rather implicitly assumed. The literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak accordingly considers the relationship between translation, gender, and power decisive. In her essay The Politics of Translation, she calls for the deconstruction of patriarchal dominance: “The task of the feminist translator is to consider language as a clue to the workings of gendered agency.”Footnote 6

The Early Modern reception of classical antiquity lends itself especially well to examining shifts in gender-specific power relations and the establishment of contemporary ideals of femininity and masculinity. The classical works are naturally by no means devoid of patriarchal viewpoints. Yet precisely Ovid, of all authors, demonstrates literary license in his Metamorphoses when he offers diverging gender images, permits sexual diversity, recounts tales of gender transformation, and describes female desire. Nor did the sixteenth-century German translators of classical works remain invisible, but rather actively participated in the gender discourse.Footnote 7 As a way of stressing the structural inequalities prevailing in the literary world of the Early Modern period, I should add the attribute ‘male’ when I speak of translators. Because among the rediscoverers of the sources of classical antiquity in German-speaking parts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there is not a single woman to be found. Male actors stand out prominently in forewords, letters of dedication, marginalia, sub-headings, and commentaries,Footnote 8 and ensure reception in compliance with the norms, within which context they distinguish not only between scholarly and vernacular, but also between male and female, recipients. In the following I would like to discuss the myths of Europa and Alcyone in Johannes Spreng’s translation of Ovid as examples of how the actions of classical heroines were adapted to correspond to contemporary gender ideals.

6.1 Spreng’s Translation Programme: The Metamorphoses as Exemplum Literature

Johannes Spreng’s German version of the Metamorphoses appeared print in 1564, published by Sigmund Feyerabend, Weigand Han (Erben), and Georg Rab in Frankfurt.Footnote 9 As Spreng reveals in the foreword, it was Feyerabend who had initiated the translation. An adaptation of the Metamorphoses in Dutch with outstanding illustrations had been circulating on the European book market and come to the enterprising publisher’s attention. Feyerabend had the artist Vergil Solis copy the woodcuts designed by Bernard SalomonFootnote 10 and subsequently commissioned the Meistersinger Spreng of Augsburg to produce the respective texts. The German translator explicitly points out that he had no say in the selection of the myths and was compelled to work from the prespecified images for reasons of cost.Footnote 11 Spreng commenced his work by immersing himself in Ovid’s scholarly language and writing a Latin partial edition of the Metamorphoses which Feyerabend published in 1563.Footnote 12 His (self-)translation of this New Latin version into the vernacular, for which he also drew on the classical epic, would follow a year later.Footnote 13 The nuanced SPP 2130 definition of translation permits me to classify this Ovid adaptation as a literary translation.Footnote 14

The New Latin and Early Modern High German editions exhibit the same structure. A heading announces the content of each myth—which in some cases is broken down into several chapters—and its events are then illustrated in a woodcut. That image is followed by a brief prose summary and, on the next quarto page, a more detailed account in Latin distiches and German rhymed couplets. Finally, the story is interpreted and its moral lesson set forth, likewise in verse.Footnote 15 These various text and image elements are intended to enhance one another, in which context the vernacular version is altogether twice as long as the Latin: the individual chapters comprise four instead of two printed pages.

Unlike the category ‘religion’, the category ‘gender’ does not appear to have played a role for Spreng. As he explains in his foreword, the German version is intended for readers not literate in Latin, ‘so that even the simple layman can recognize himself in it and delight in the wonderful poetry to his own edification’.Footnote 16 Spreng’s approach differs from that of the first German translation of the Metamorphoses by the novelist Jörg Wickram of Colmar in that he makes no distinction between a male and a female readership. Whereas Wickram had taken the moral sensitivities of women specifically into account,Footnote 17 Spreng’s term “der gemeine Lay” (‘the common layperson’) creates the impression of a gender-free translation. Yet already the foreword offers a presentiment of how little that is the case. Johannes Spreng promotes his work by stressing the moral benefit of reading it. Ovid, he argues, had written the fifteen books of the Metamorphoses with no other purpose in mind than to ‘implant honour, modesty and virtue in many’ (“ehr / scham / vnd tugend bey menigklich gepflantzet”) and, conversely, to stamp out ‘dishonour, vice and all manner of malevolence’ (“schand / laster / vnd allerley mutwillen”).Footnote 18 The code of conduct in the Early Modern era was, however, binary in structure. Women were expected to adhere to a morality different from men if they wanted to preserve their female honour.

But—we might critically interject—to what extent did Johannes Spreng even intentionally pursue a gender-specific policy? Was his translation not perhaps simply subject to rules and regulations of contemporary discourse he was powerless to escape? In our analysis, however, I consider it a vain endeavour to try to differentiate between the intentionally acting translator subject and his social imprint, because translational action is entirely inconceivable without sociocultural context and discursive parameters. There is in any case something remarkable about the premodern casting of Ovid—an author with a penchant for stories about love, sex, violence, adultery, incest, and intercourse between gods and humans—as a teacher of virtue.Footnote 19 The beneficial lesson is not always discernible at first sight, Spreng admits, because it lies concealed like a sweet core within a hard shell.Footnote 20 The necessity of revealing these moral principles naturally strengthens the male interpreter’s position. He must take a stance if he is to enlighten the recipient of the exemplary nature of the tales. Spreng accordingly stresses that the Metamorphoses contribute to the recognition of God’s almightiness and announces his intention to draw a link between Ovid’s myths on the one hand and the Bible and religious tradition on the other.Footnote 21

6.2 Conveying Norms Through Cautionary Example: Europa as a Seducible Maiden

Already the heading and the woodcut in Spreng’s Metamorphoses suffice to call to mind the tale of the maiden who gave the European continent its name: the daughter of the King of Phoenicia is abducted by Jupiter, the father of the gods, in the form of a bull.Footnote 22 The illustration depicts the moment in which the bull escapes across the surging sea with the young woman on its back (see Fig. 6.1). As described by Ovid at the end of the second book of the Metamorphoses, Europa grips the bull’s horn with her right hand and steadies herself on its back with her left, her robes fluttering in the wind.Footnote 23 Her companions remain behind in safety on the shore, gazing after her in bewilderment. One spreads her arms as she calls for help; the other turns her back as if to flee but cannot wrest her eyes from the terrible sight. In the background are two cows from the herd of cattle with which the abductor has mingled to approach his prey unnoticed.

Fig. 6.1
figure 1

Jupiter Abducting Europa, woodcut by Vergil Solis, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Res/A.lat.a. 1240, fol. 71r

Full size image

Without divulging the female protagonist’s name, the heading focusses on the father of the gods: “Jupiter into a bull”.Footnote 24 This corresponds to the perspective of the classical pre-text in that it sheds light on the god’s motivation and course of action; Europa, for her part, is nothing but the object of his lust and not even mentioned by name.Footnote 25 Because he desires a mortal woman, he cannot wield his full power but must conceal his divine aura: the father of the gods puts his sceptre aside and transforms himself into a bull. Yet even in the herd of cattle which Mercury has driven to the coast on his behalf, Jupiter stands out. The bull’s hide is as white as snow, its neck ripples with muscles, and its horns are as elegantly curved as if they had been turned by an artist. After all, the peacefully grazing animal must depend solely on its outward magnificence to catch the princess’s fancy.

In the abbreviated German version of the Metamorphoses, Johannes Spreng conspicuously shifts the emphasis in the relationship between god and human. Whereas the brief prose summary still corresponds to the classical pre-text, Spreng then goes on to place Europa at the centre of attention, thus changing the initial constellation of the overly powerful perpetrator and his female victim. Whereas Ovid only briefly mentions that the princess was in the habit of playing on the beach, the German translator claims that young women ‘amused themselves’ (“jr kurtzweil trieben”) there ‘with great longing’ (“mit grossem verlangen”).Footnote 26 Rather than a male god out to quench his passion, it is desirous women who set the scene in Spreng’s version. The Phoenician princess is a member of the female collective seeking diversion on the beach. Whereas in many other cases the translator radically prunes the Ovidian myths, here he spends nearly ten verses embroidering on the young lady’s pleasures. The princess organizes various games; she and her friends are in the best of moods and enjoying themselves to the fullest.

In keeping with this portrayal of Europa, her encounter with the bull takes a much different course in the German adaptation than in the classical source text. In Ovid’s tale, her conduct is marked by caution and restraint. She admires the bull’s beauty but shies away from touching it, despite its placidity. She only gradually ventures closer and holds flowers up to its white muzzle. Playing with the double perspective offered by the two figures, the Ovidian account moreover contrasts Europa’s guarded movements with Jupiter’s growing arousal. As she feeds the beautiful animal, he kisses her hands, thinking about the imminent fulfilment of his passion, and can hardly contain himself. Outwardly, however, the bull keeps up its gentle, harmless behaviour, belying its true identity: it plays with the maiden, prances about on the meadow, lies down before her, lets her fondle its breast and weave flowers around its horns. When Europa finally dares to mount the wondrous animal’s back, Jupiter has reached his goal. He stealthily ventures ever farther afield, cunningly extricating her from the circle of her companions, and thus making of her what he has intended from the outset: his quarry.Footnote 27

In the Spreng version, on the other hand, the father of the gods must undertake no such painstaking efforts to gain the maiden’s trust. On the contrary, she proves easily seducible from the start. All the girls are enamoured with the pretty beast, whose description is much shorter than in the classical pre-text. Naturally, the princess is the most daring of all in the amusements that ensue: she boldly approaches the unfamiliar animal to feed it. In literature, and particularly poetry, flower-picking is a favoured allusion to defloration. Here again, the female protagonist of the German text exhibits especially conspicuous behaviour. Rather than daintily plucking the daisies, Spreng’s Europa rambunctiously tears them out of the earth, complete with the grass around them, thus setting herself apart from many other female figures in literature including her own ancient predecessor. The bull relishes in the plants’ consumption, a circumstance the translator interprets as a sign of mutual agreement. Rather than adhering to Jupiter’s carefully calculated deception, Spreng endows the princess with an erotic interest of her own: With his kisses, the animal indicates to her ‘that she can also be certain of his love’.Footnote 28 The German translator construes Europa’s games with the bull as a continuation of the young women’s frivolities and amusements—now, however, charged with sexual meaning. He relates, for example, that she pats the bull kindly on the breast, that she ‘desires this ox’ (“zu disem Ochsen lust”), weaves a wreath of flowers for it, hangs it on its horns, and spends a long time playing with it.

The numerous shifts of emphasis in the Early Modern High German translation enable Spreng to arrive at a conclusion completely different from Ovid’s about the girl’s abduction. In his telling, the princess is no innocent victim unaware of the nature of the beast to which she entrusts herself. On the contrary, she seems entirely agreeable to her kidnapping—in fact to want it—and virtually to incite her admirer to act by giving it a fervent embrace. According to the German translator: ‘She finally pressed it tightly to her body and seated herself on its back.’Footnote 29 This ‘rewriting’ could of course be construed as an empowerment of the female protagonist in the sense that it permits her sensibilities of her own and transforms her from desired object into desiring subject. However, the German translator’s sympathies are clearly with the bull, whose forbearance he stresses once again precisely in the moment in which the transformed god achieves his aim.

The only behaviour portrayed as unseemly in the German version is that of the female protagonist, who treats the bull like a bridled horse. Quite in keeping with this shift in the two figures’ relationship, the German Jupiter is not compelled to steal craftily away, but saunters leisurely into the water and continues his course across the sea only because there is nothing holding him back. This creates the impression that Europa would still have had plenty of opportunity to escape him and remain with her companions. It is not until the waters grow deep that her situation suddenly becomes dead serious. The young woman is now her abductor’s prisoner; his true identity and power come to light. In the end, the vernacular version and the classical pre-text once again converge as regards the relationship between the sexes: Jupiter hurries away across the sea with his prey.

In the German translation, Europa is thus by no means wholly at the mercy of her mighty opponent. On the contrary, Johannes Spreng makes her responsible for her own sad fate; she has brought her misfortune upon herself with her frivolous concessions.Footnote 30 The sixteenth-century translation of Ovid is accordingly based on the same argument frequently still cited as late as the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the context of rape trials. A favourite strategy used by defence lawyers to exonerate alleged offenders is to lay the blame on the victims. As the American psychologist William Ryan reveals in his study Blaming the Victim (1971), this method contributes effectively to perpetuating structural discrimination and legitimizing racist domination.Footnote 31

Spreng explicitly frames this reversed perpetrator-victim relationship in the moral interpretation accompanying the myth. There he generalizes the case and presents Europa as a cautionary example whose fate young women should guard themselves against. It is the destiny that will befall all daughters ‘who are wanton, bold, and presumptuous, offer themselves at the dance, and seek the company of many young men.’Footnote 32 Although Europa’s father, the Phoenician King Agenor, makes no appearance in the Ovidian myth, Spreng reduces her to the role of daughter. By linking gender with the category of age, he subjects her to male authority and marginalizes her as a disobedient, easily seducible young girl. The interpretation charges the dancing women with two violations of the social order. On the one hand, they evade the influence of the family, thus challenging paternal authority. On the other hand, they do not conform to established gender roles because, in their search for a partner, they become active themselves, sometimes even yielding to several admirers. In Spreng’s view, young women who leave their fathers’ houses and prefer the company of young men put themselves at risk. When they give in to the temptation to commit vice and suffer damage as a result, they deserve no mercy. ‘For they have betrayed themselves’, the moral lesson concludes.Footnote 33

The message conveyed by the woodcut takes a similar vein (see Fig. 6.1): the female figure on the bull’s back has gathered up her robe to keep it from getting wet, which in turn has the effect of prominently staging her naked left leg. Europa as depicted by the woodblock carver Vergil Solis is thus likewise not anxiously trying to protect herself. Much to the contrary, she adeptly displays her physical charms. Her companions’ gestures indicate the urgency of avoiding such behaviour. This motif of warning is an iconographic element with no basis in the classical text. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the princess’s companions are entirely peripheral figures. They are mentioned at the beginning and then disappear from the scene altogether. Their later reintegration by Solis supplies the end of the story with a new dimension of meaning. The other women’s dismay renders Europa an exemplum within the pictorial narrative. The gist of their presence is that, rather than a superordinate male authority, it is young women readers’ own social peers who warn them against too much promiscuity.

6.3 Conveying Norms Through Idealization: Alcyone as a Devoted Wife

Johannes Spreng presents Europa as an example of vice and disgrace to be avoided, thus clearly addressing a female readership, at least implicitly. He interprets many of the Metamorphoses’ other heroines, however, as moral models the female readers should take as orientation. One such idealized female figure is Alcyone, whom Spreng introduces as the ‘housewife’ (“Hausfrawen”) of the Thessalian King Ceyx.Footnote 34 Even if this term was more broadly defined in earlier stages of the German language than it is today, it did explicitly assign the woman to the domestic sphere.Footnote 35 Ovid, who relates the tale in the eleventh book of the Metamorphoses, focuses entirely on the couple’s fervent love for one another.Footnote 36 Alcyone only reluctantly allows her husband to set out on a dangerous journey, fearing he might be shipwrecked and never come home again. In nearly a hundred verses, Ovid artfully relates how these fears come true: a ferocious storm blows up, the ship sinks, and Ceyx drowns. Alcyone learns of the disaster in a dream sent by the gods and is inconsolable: without her beloved husband she no longer wants to live. When she rushes towards his corpse as it washes towards the shore, the gods take pity. They turn the two partners into birds, allowing them to preserve their devotion to one another in changed form.

In the classical pre-text, the sad love story of Alcyone and Ceyx is eight times as long—and in Spreng’s German translation four times as long—as the myth of Europa, so that I am compelled to limit my analysis to only a selected passage. The second of the four chapters, which Spreng devotes to the ancient couple, lends itself especially well to an examination of gender-specific shifts of emphasis. The heading announces: ‘Alcyone Pleading to Juno’.Footnote 37 This scene is depicted in the foreground of the woodcut (see Fig. 6.2). The crowned queen kneels humbly before a statue of a goddess set up in an open temple and accompanied by a peacock. Alcyone beseechingly stretches out her arms towards Juno. Above them, separated from the terrestrial sphere by a wreath of clouds, is another scene: the enthroned goddess summons her messenger Iris. The ship afloat in the sky between heaven and earth represents the subject of Alcyone’s prayer and Juno’s response.

Fig. 6.2
figure 2

Alcyone Pleading to Juno, woodcut by Vergil Solis. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Res/A.lat.a. 1240, fol. 281r

Full size image

In Ovid, this episode is relatively brief. The narrator contrasts Ceyx’s horrible death with the hopes borne of Alcyone’s ignorance: she still has no presentiment of the terrible misfortune. She counts the nights, diligently works on making clothes for her husband, waits for his return, and offers up sacrifices to all the gods. She appeals especially to Juno for the safe and happy return of her husband, who is already long dead. Of her many wishes, only one can still come true, the narrator pointedly remarks: that her husband will not favour any other woman. Juno, for her part, can finally no longer endure being invocated for a dead man. She sends Iris to the god of sleep with the request that he appear to Alcyone in the form of the drowned Ceyx and inform her of his fate.

Once again, it is not the German prose summary but the translator’s retelling of the tale in verse that exhibits numerous nuanced shifts of meaning. Spreng spreads out the content of the fifteen Latin hexameters over twenty-three rhymed couplets by reporting in detail about Alcyone’s fears, troubles, and entreaties. The vernacular version differs from the classical pre-text in that, for example, the main protagonist has no fear of losing her husband before his departure. Initially, that is, Spreng makes no mention of dark presentiments, an omission he will compensate for in the chapter on the heroine’s intercessory prayer. It is not until her husband fails to return as planned that Alcyone begins to worry. The longer his absence, the greater her fears. She senses that something dreadful must have happened. Whereas her Latin predecessor can hardly wait to spend the nights in her lover’s arms again, the German Alcyone nearly loses her mind with apprehension. By day she is restless; by night she cannot sleep.

The German translation also intensifies the main female character’s religious efforts. In both versions of the myth, she makes sacrifices to the gods, especially to Juno. Spreng, however, adds that Alcyone pays repeated visits to Juno’s temple, uttering countless praises to the goddess and depositing many an offering on her altar. The German protagonist voluntarily submits herself entirely to the deity. In Spreng’s translation, she prays to the goddess with the utmost subservience, begging Juno to commend her king to the grace of the gods and allow him to return home safe and sound.Footnote 38 Expansions on the source text are also found in the description of Juno’s reaction. Whereas in Ovid her actions are motivated by the desire to keep the unfortunate woman’s hands off her altar, Spreng paints a picture of an empathetic, merciful deity. His Juno can no longer bear to watch the mortal woman descend ever further into anguish. Whereas in the ancient version the dream cruelly destroys Alcyone’s every last hope, in the German translation it has a downright liberating effect: it finally puts an end to her excruciating uncertainty. By means of these many additions, the German translator manages to remould the figural concept established by the classical pre-text and adapt it to contemporary models. The passionate heroine becomes a devoted housewife prepared to do anything and everything to help her husband.

The interpretation goes into the Early Modern gender ideal in greater detail. Spreng pronounces Alcyone a shining example of femininity and sings the praises of such wives: ‘Through the gracious Alcyone, we all have a fine illustration of a woman who loves her husband and cares for him from dawn till dusk.’Footnote 39 The fact that this interpretation corresponds to the storyline only in part evidently does not bother him: even in the German version, the protagonist does not care for her husband but worries about him and fears his loss. Whereas Ovid emphasizes her passionate desire, Spreng is concerned with women’s unconditional focus on and subordination to men. The translator formulates his religious appreciation for Alcyone from a distinctly male perspective, even if he never says so explicitly. A devout woman should be referred to as a ‘faithful treasure’ (“treuwer Schatz”), he explains, because she is a gift given by God himself. The fact that she is God’s gift to man goes without saying. In the following eight verses, Spreng describes the nature of such a woman’s exemplariness. She enters into a symbiotic relationship with her husband, is emotionally dependent on him, shares his sensibilities and sufferings, and does everything in her power to stand by him and ease his hardships:

Wann dem Mann steht ein vbel zu/

So hat ein frommes Weib kein ruw/

Sie trauret tag vnd nacht sehr fast/

Vnd tregt mit jm gemeinen last/

Sein not thut sie jm helffen klagen/

Darzu das Creutz tragen/

Sie auch an Gottes /

Daß er jn durch sein gnad ./Footnote 40

If the man is befallen with evil, a devout woman has no peace; she mourns deeply day and night and bears the burden with him. She helps him lament his woes, patiently carrying the cross; she also prays to God in His goodness, that He protect him with His grace.

To underpin the gender hierarchy, Spreng makes skilful allusions to biblical passages. For example, he cites Paul’s non-gender-specific appeal to bear one another’s burdens (Gal. 6:2) as a one-sidedly feminine duty. And Jesus’s bidding that anyone who wants to follow him should take up their cross (Lk. 9:23, Mk. 8:34, Mt. 10:38) is modified to conform to the prevailing gender ideology. Spreng demands that a woman should help her husband carry the cross. Woman as man’s helper—a conception that goes back to the second creation story—here finds a Christian counterpart. Women’s every suffering, aspiration, and prayer should serve the wellbeing of men.

6.4 Competing Interpretations: Irresponsible Princes and Disloyal Heathens

Spreng’s gender-normalizing translations of the Europa and Alcyone myths were not the only interpretations available to German readers of the sixteenth century. A vernacular edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses had already come onto the market some twenty years earlier. Like Spreng’s, it is not a direct translation of the classical pre-text, but an adaptation by Jörg Wickram of an older, Middle High German translation by Albrecht von Halberstadt (ca. 1200) for the publisher Ivo Schöffer of Mainz. This first German version of the Metamorphoses to appear in print moreover contains annotations by a certain Gerhard Lorichius, a teacher of Hadamar.Footnote 41 His interpretation of the myth of Europa corresponds to Spreng’s in its most delicate point: Lorichius likewise adopts the ‘blaming-the-victim’ approach. He pronounces Europa guilty, adding that she has only been abducted ‘because of frivolous curiosity, lechery, and wicked desires’.Footnote 42

In his moral argumentation, Lorichius broadens the gender-specific perspective by regarding not just daughters, but children in general—and particularly those of high estate—as endangered. He directs his warning not to young nobles, however, but to those in charge of them: their fathers. May the story of the Phoenician princess serve all great and noble lords as a warning. If they want to prevent their own children from experiencing such perilous lust and already committing mental adultery at a young age, they must raise them with a firm hand. Lorichius’s commentary thus exhibits an even stronger tendency towards stabilizing the social order than Spreng’s interpretation. Fathers should control their adolescent children so strictly as to prevent them from developing any desires at all.Footnote 43 This patriarchal reading could hardly be further from Ovid’s myth of Europa—or, for that matter, from Wickram’s translation of it, in which a powerful god abducts a young woman by way of deception.

The professor of poetics and elocution Georg Sabinus of Königsberg, on the other hand, presents an interpretation far more compatible to the classical narrative. In his Fabularum Ovidii interpretatio printed by Georg Rhau’s heirs in Wittenberg in 1554, his focus is not the female victim’s behaviour but the male perpetrator’s actions and their problematic nature. He associates the story of Jupiter and Europa with lecherous princes notorious for abducting young maidens, accusing them of violating their duties and not living up to their role in society. In Sabinus’s view, sexual assaults are neither trivial offences nor are they very flattering for men in power. In view of their unscrupulous romances, they remind him of bulls.Footnote 44 Unlike Spreng and Lorichius, Sabinus uses his Latin interpretation to criticize the privileged, not the powerless.Footnote 45

Sabinus’s reading of the tale of Alcyone and Ceyx likewise differs conspicuously from Lorichius’s. The Königsberg professor considers the story an exemplary representation of conjugal love.Footnote 46 He not only points out how ardently Alcyone longs for her husband and how deeply she suffers from their separation, but also calls attention to the reciprocity of the couple’s feelings. Unlike Spreng, he stresses that Ceyx also fervently loves his wife, a circumstance to which his dying words testify. The Hessian teacher Lorichius, for his part, concentrates on the male protagonist and all but ignores the heroine. Rather than praising Alcyone as a model of female loyalty like Jörg Wickram,Footnote 47 he portrays Ceyx as an example of heathen infidelity. Although Ovid’s text gives not the slightest indication that the shipwreck could be a punishment, and the Ovidian narrator and gods alike feel sympathy for the lovers, Lorichius denigrates the drowned man: sinners are ill advised to take to the sea, because there they will have to atone for their wickedness.Footnote 48 The German annotator introduces the category of religion to the myth as a way of charging the pre-Christian hero with the responsibility for his own death. In the end, he softens his verdict somewhat by adding that, on Judgement Day, a milder sentence will await a heathen like Ceyx—who repents of his sins before death and has already received his punishment—than those godless Christians who show not the slightest remorse for their sins.

The Early Modern interpretations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses thus differ from one another, in part substantially, as we see in the tales of Europa, Alcyone, and Ceyx. What the above-examined translations and annotations have in common, however, is that they use their rewritings of the classical pre-text to convey contemporary norms.Footnote 49 Warning and idealization are two key interpretation strategies for negotiating the transfer of culture and ideology and reassessing the contents. In the Early Modern translations of classical literature, gender and religion are presumably the most important categories in which normalizing shifts of emphasis can be observed. Yet age and social status also repeatedly play a role and are interlinked, leading in part to multiple discriminations.Footnote 50

Many scholars might regret the fact that the Early Modern High German translations of classical texts offer little critique of normativity and rarely call the patriarchal order into question—even in the case of such mastery in the portrayal of gender as Ovid’s. When it stages ancient heroines and heroes as moral examples, Early Modern translation literature mirrors the value and power system of its own time. Yet the importance of literature for the history of gender far exceeds those bounds: translations not only reflect sexual differences but construct them. They contribute to stabilizing social hierarchies and reinforcing privilege and marginalization tendencies. The special appeal of an investigation from the point of view of linguistic and literary theory consists precisely in the possibility of reconstructing the emergence and legitimization of such inequalities. Translation studies profit from gender studies—and in the context of research on the Early Modern period the reverse is also true. Comparative translation analyses can help demonstrate how linguistic and literary techniques were used by translators to transform Ovid’s heroines into Early Modern ‘Hausfrawen’, and thus how gender concepts are discursively generated and narratively disseminated.