Arnulf of Orléans ca. 1170 produced a composite commentary on Ovid's Metamorphoses. This multifaceted commentary, which includes philological and allegorical interpretations, has left behind a large amount of manuscript evidence from various geographical locations and different time periods. To date, no complete medieval commentary on the Metamorphoses has ever been critically edited in full. The purpose of this dissertation is to bring to the modern reader a critically edited version of one of the most influential commentaries on the Metamorphoses, which also happens to be one of the earliest full commentaries on the poem still extant.
This study also analyzes fully the extant manuscript evidence paleographically and codicologically to make accessible to the reader the textual relationships of the manuscripts, and also to examine the ways in which their physical formats affected the use of the commentary throughout its long tradition. The commentary and its manuscript tradition shed valuable insight into both the medieval and humanistic classrooms, their pedagogy and styles of instruction, as well as various approaches to the study and teaching of Classical Latin poetry.