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Thanks to the age-long efforts of Birger Munk Olsen, to whom the present article is dedicated, we have a good overview of how the Roman classics were spread, read, and (re-)used up to the year 1200, but we have no such cicerone for the Late Middle Ages. Taking the medieval commentaries on the Metamorphoses as a point of departure, the article is an attempt to open up the Ovidius moralizatus of Pierre Bersuire, a fourteenth-century commentary that hitherto has received relatively little notice due to the lack of a critical edition. After a preliminary discussion of how the Ovidius moralizatus relates to the earlier medieval commentary tradition and a general assessment of the Avignon and Paris versions, the core of the article focuses on the explanatory principles.

Issue 3 of Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures explores the theme of the rediscovery and canonization of the Roman classics in medieval Western European literary culture, beginning in the eleventh century and reaching a wide impact on literary and intellectual life in the twelfth century. It is headed by an article by Birger Munk Olsen whose immense and comprehensive work of cataloguing and analyzing the entire record of manuscripts containing Roman classics copied before 1200 is nearing completion (L‘étude des auteurs classiques aux XIe et XIIe siècles, 5 vols). Within our journal’s scope of medieval European literature we have found it both rewarding and fitting to take Munk Olsen’s work as a prism for what is a striking literary phenomenon across most geographies and chronologies of medieval Europe: the engagement with the pre-Christian classics. The catalogue and the synthesis by Munk Olsen put many kinds of new studies on a firm footing. In this issue of Interfaces we present three 'frontiers' or types of scholarship on the rediscovery and canonization of the Roman classics all taking their cue from the meticulous way L’étude has charted out this territory.