'Essays on Propertian and Ovidian Elegy: A Limping Lady for Stephen Heyworth' is published by Oxford University Press

Essays on Propertian and Ovidian Elegy: A Limping Lady for Stephen Heyworth was originally planned as a 65th birthday present for Stephen Heyworth, Professor of Latin and Wadham's Bowra Fellow and Tutor in Classics. Publication of The Limping Lady was slightly delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, but she appeared in February. Steve was delighted to host a dinner in the Old Library for the editors, contributors, and other friends on Ovid’s 2066th birthday, 20th March 2024.

The co-editors, Tristan Franklinos and Jennifer Ingleheart, brought together a group of authors, all of whom, including themselves, they describe as having "...benefitted from the extraordinary generosity of mind and spirit with which Steve treats his undergraduate and graduate charges and his postdoctoral colleagues, as well as the rigorous, incisive, and tireless approach he takes to closely reading texts and to exploring the cultures in which they came into being. Nobody who has had the experience of reading Latin with Steve will be able to forget it..."

Together, the editors and authors created a volume with the following contents:

1: Possessive pronouns in Latin love elegy: Propertius and the land confiscations, Daniel Jolowicz

2: Preposterous Propertius, Donncha O'Rourke

3: Propertius 3.10: A Festschrift for Cynthia?, Matthew Robinson

4: Reading sex in Amores 1.4 and 1.5: repetition, coupling, and Ovidian erotics, Jennifer Ingleheart

5: Sowing the seeds of love: Ovid's Sementivae (Fasti 1.655-704), Rebecca Armstrong

6: Rivers and Fluid Identities in the Fasti, Krešimir Vuković

7: Humiliation and revenge in Ovid's Fasti, Bobby Xinyue

8: Horatian moments in Ovid's career and the end of Fasti 6, Gail Trimble

9: Trying to make up for lost time with dear friends in Ovid, Tristia 3, T. E. Franklinos

10: Closing time: moving towards the end in Epistulae ex Ponto 4, Bruce Gibson

11: Talking heads, talking statues: Ovidian antiquarianism in Renaissance Rome, Helen M. Dixon

Professor Heyworth said:

"Though I regard this volume as preposterous in conception – I feel far too young for a Festschrift – I am immensely proud of what the editors and contributors have achieved. Of the eleven authors, eight were my graduate students (two of them at Wadham), together with two Wadham undergraduates, and one whom I mentored as a post-doc. I think of them as a wide-ranging group, so it is extraordinary that they managed to produce a book so elegantly focused on elegy. The papers are universally excellent, and I’ve learned a lot in reading them. They engage with Propertius and Ovid through a wide range of approaches, some surveying widespread technicalities like personal possessives and hysteron proteron, others focussing on single poems and passages, or exploring sequence or closure, intertexts or intratexts, reading through an ecocritical lens or looking back from a neglected Renaissance elegy. They ask challenging questions that lead to insightful answers. And from time to time they made me laugh. I am very grateful."