Hello and welcome to this close readings fusion episode of the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones.

I'm joined today by Irina Domitrescu, a professor of medieval

English studies at the University of Bonn, to talk about Ovid, Chaucer and what happens when men

write women's stories. Close readings is a multi-series podcast subscription from the LRB. In one of the

series, Emily Wilson talks to me about a dozen ancient Greek and Roman poets and

playwrights from Homer and Sappho to Horace and Seneca. In another, Irina is in conversation

with Mary Wellesley about eight centuries of medieval literature, from Beowulf to the Digby-Marie

Magdalene play, and in the third series, Mark Ford and Seamus Perry discussed long poems and

short stories of the 19th and 20th centuries.

But of course, none of those periods of literature exist in isolation from one another,

and earlier this year Mark and Mary met to talk about Thomas Hardy's medieval mind

and the importance of the Middle Ages to the Victorian imagination.

And today, Irina and I will be discussing Chaucer's classical mind and the role of the ancient Greek and Roman world in the medieval imagination. And today, Irina and I will be discussing Chaucer's classical mind and the role of

the ancient Greek and Roman world in the medieval imagination. They're looking in particular at Chaucer and

Ovid and two of their less well-known, but no less interesting poetic works, Ovid's Herodies and Chaucer's

legend of good women. Hello, Irina, and thank you so much for talking to me today. Hello, Tom. How important was the classical world to Chaucer's legend of good women. Hello, Irina, and thank you so much for talking to me today.

Hello, Tom. How important was the classical world to Chaucer's worldview or to the world of his

poems? It's quite important. He lives in a time when the ideal is certainly not to be original. An author

builds his credibility, the interest on repeating old stories. It's a moment,

much like today in a funny sort of way, when we're seeing a renaissance of classical and medieval

stories being retold. In Chaucer's case, that's true to the extent that he will sometimes

make up classical sources even when they don't exist.

...