A 1484 figure from Ovide Moralisé, edition by Colard Mansion.

This woodcut may illustrate a medieval romance, Le Chevalier de la Charette, about Sir Launcelot's humiliation in love (riding in a farmcart). The authors of the Middle Ages used Ovid's work as a way to read and write about sex and violence without the orthodox "scrutiny routinely given to commentaries on the Bible". Ovidius Moralizatus (Ovide Moralisé) was a work of mythography completed in 1340 by means of which a friend of Petrarch, Pierre Bersuire (ca. 1290-1362), legitimized the classical, non-Christian work of Ovid by transforming it into a literature of "moralization". Bersuire's "moralization" of Ovid in turn influenced Geoffrey Chaucer, who drew on many of its stories for his Canterbury Tales. Later Ovid's poetry provided further inspiration for the Renaissance idea of humanism, and more specifically, for many Renaissance painters and writers such as Shakespeare. Picture and data courtesy of the Yorck Project, under Creative Commons Attribution-Share- Alike License (Wikipedia)