The Deidamia Achilli: An Eleventh Century Statian-Ovidian Epistle

Abstract

This paper focuses upon the anonymous eleventh-century verse epistle, the Deidamia Achilli, purportedly written by Deidamia to her unfaithful husband Achilles at Troy. It examines the work's engagement with two Classical intertexts, Ovid's Heroides and Statius' Achilleid. After first continuing the efforts of Stohlmann (1973) and Hagedorn (2004) in detecting allusions to these texts, it brings to bear on the medieval poem modern critical interpretations which have been applied to the Heroides and Achilleid. The poet, it is suggested, is a sensitive and astute reader of Ovid and Statius, redeploying their strategies at the same time as he asserts his own Deidamia's point of view against the competing voices of the literary tradition. The article is followed by an appendix which contains Stohlmann's 1973 text and a translation of the poem (which has not previously been rendered into English).