An aggrieved heroine in Merovingian Gaul : Venantius Fortunatus, Radegund’s lament on the destruction of Thuringia, and echoing Ovid’s "Heroides"

This paper is devoted to De excidio Thoringiae, a poem written by Venantius Fortunatus in the voice of queen Radegund, an ex-wife of the king Chlothar I and, at the time of its composition, a nun at the Abbey of the Holy Cross at Poitiers. As in his many other poems, also in this text Fortunatus reuses the poetics of one of his favorite literary models, Ovid. Now it is the poetics of the héroïde, a letter of a mythical heroine to her absent lover. Yet what makes Fortunatus’s De excidio unique is the fact that the Ovidian paradigm, rather than properly reapplied, is only ‘echoed’: the ‘love’ between the female protagonist and her male addressee (Radegund’s last surviving cousin, Amalafrid) is described non as an actual experience but merely as a remote, quasi-mythical past, an affair that did not really take place because the two would-be lovers were much too young then. Similarly, the figure of Radegund as pictured in De excidio is wholly fictionalized (hence it cannot derogate from the reputation Radegund-the nun deserves) and, indeed, used only as a literary ‘costume’: a careful reader can easily notice that the speaking ego does not fully identify with the role of a ‘lovelorn maiden’. This ostentatious literariness makes the whole situation justifiable and attractive for the readership.