John Ridewall, Fulgentius metaforalis

John Ridewall's Fulgencius metaforalis is a moralising commentary on Fulgentius's sixth-century Mitologiae, an introduction to the classical gods and their stories.

Composed in Oxford in the 1330s and subject to almost immediate local (and broader English) use, the work was a pan-European success, and more than 100 manuscripts preserve Ridewall's text in some form.

Fulgencius metaforalis has been edited before, nearly a century ago, by a great medievalist, Hans Liebeschütz; he, however, did not recognise that the manuscript he presented was a fragment, containing only about one-third of the whole.

This volume provides Ridewall's entire text, as usually communicated, with a translation.

In addition, it contains a substantial introduction; this outlines various difficulties in the transmission of Fulgencius and evidence for the work's extensive medieval reception.

Annotation to the text identifies and indexes Ridewall's sources – most of his mythographic knowledge reflects either Remigius of Auxerre's commentary on Martianus Capella or the Third Vatican Mythographer; and offers one manuscript tabula/index, useful for seeing how readers may have accessed the work piecemeal (by manuscript consultation, not, as frequently claimed, as a set of 'memory diagrams').