Human Being and Animal Becoming: Actaeon and His Dogs

In this lecture Peggy McCracken focuses on the story of Actaeon the hunter, transformed into a stag, as it is found in the fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé, or the Moralized Ovid, the first full translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses into French. In considering the several metamorphoses in this story and its moralizing interpretations, she will ask what descriptions of human bodies transformed into animal bodies may tell us about the values that ground human being and becoming.

Peggy McCracken is Mary Fair Croushore Professor of the Humanities, Director of the Institute for the Humanities, and Professor of French, Women's Studies, and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan.

This event is free and open to all but booking is required.