Ovid’s Poems in the Printed Books of Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Hungary

Masterpieces of the classical Latin poetry were continuously among the products of the printing presses. Although Ovid was among the popular antique authors, researches in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century history of Hungarian book-printing show a surprising picture: only a few editions of Ovid’s works are known. In spite of this, Ovid was an often cited author in Hungary even before the publication of the first home edition of his works. There are two explanations for this: (1) foreign editions were used instead, or (2) citations, adaptations, and translations circulated beside the official whole-text editions.