ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with a hitherto largely neglected field of research within the topic of fashioning eighteenth-century childhood, that is the reception of major texts of classical antiquity in schools as the cultural and educational locations. It focuses on school editions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and this for two reasons. First, these mythological tales of sex and crime were especially attractive and exciting for young readers. Second, for literary critics of the eighteenth century, a period that is usually classified as ‘neo-classicism’, Ovid was a particularly problematic author, as he and especially his Metamorphoses could hardly be integrated into the critical discourse of this epoch of fundamental change in intellectual and cultural history. In contrast to John Clarke who had instrumentalized the Metamorphoses against the ‘lies’ of Catholics, Nathan Bailey perceives in them ‘lessons of morality’.
