"The Benedictine preacher Pierre Bersuire (ca. 1290-1362), also known by his Latin name Petrus Berchorius, was a prolific author and translator who spent much of his life working in the elite literary circles at Avignon and Paris. Like so many of his contemporaries, Bersuire valued both the Bible and classical literature as sources of moral instruction. The Moralized Ovid, commonly referred to by its Latin title, Ovidius moralizatus, to distinguish it from the anonymous French vernacular Ovide moralisâe, was arguably the most influential interpretation of Ovid's Metamorphoses in the High Middle Ages. The Moralized Ovid circulated in three distinct versions produced in Avignon and Paris between 1340 and 1362. All three versions consist of sixteen sections in total-fifteen books, each corresponding to a book of the Metamorphoses, introduced by a first section comprising a brief prologue connected to a rather lengthy description of the major pagan deities. The Moralized Ovid may be considered the product of a long tradition of allegory and reworking of the Metamorphoses from late antiquity to 1340. At the same time, the Moralized Ovid also represents a new departure in Ovidian interpretation during the High Middle Ages, for Bersuire provides his readers, many of whom were probably preachers, with abundant illustrative material to inspire the minds of their listeners. His allegories and moralizations therefore have a distinctly Christian flavor and outlook, and are usually backed up by one or more proof texts drawn from a wide range of authors, including Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, Cicero, Gregory the Great, Pliny the Elder, Rabanus Maurus, Seneca, and Solinus"--