The Protean Ass: The 'Metamorphoses' of Apuleius from Antiquity to the Renaissance

Carver, Robert H.F.

Abstract

The Protean Ass provides the most comprehensive account (in any language) of the reception of The Golden Ass (or Metamorphoses ) of Apuleius, the only work of Latin prose fiction worthy of the name of 'novel' to survive intact from the ancient world. Apuleius' second-century account of the curious young man who is changed into a donkey following an affair with a witch's slave-girl, and undergoes a series of adventures (involving robbery, adultery, buggery, and bestiality) before a divine vision transforms him into a disciple of the goddess Isis, has delighted, perplexed, and inspired readers as diverse as St Augustine, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. Robert H. F. Carver traces readers' responses to the novel from the third to the seventeenth centuries in North Africa, Italy, France, Germany, and England

Citation

Carver, R. H. (2007). The Protean Ass: The 'Metamorphoses' of Apuleius from Antiquity to the Renaissance. Oxford University Press

• Book Type: Authored Book
• Publication Date: Dec 6, 2007
• Deposit Date: Mar 7, 2008
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Series Title: Oxford classical monographs
• Keywords: Early Middle Ages, Asinus Redivivus, Age of Print, William Adlington, Philip Sidney, Shakespeare, Faerie Queene.
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1126904
• Publisher URL: http://www.oup.com/uk/catalogue/?ci=9780199217861