Ovid was a poet who – poetically speaking – could barely shut up. His ‘voice’ is one of the best attested from antiquity, having yelled its way out via a booming corpus of multivocal elegiac couplets and a loud rhetorical epic of gargantuan proportions. ‘Speech loss’ would not be the first words you would throw back at him, but this book shows (again) just how important this concept is to late Ovidian poetics. Right around the kicker moment of exilic heartbreak, Ovid flooded his market with tales of enforced silence, embroiling both his internal characters in the Metamorphoses and the first-person(a) himself in exile. That is the kernel around which N.’s book clusters, clutters – and unfortunately curdles.

N.’s introduction takes its time to frame the project. From a recent history of scholarship on exile in Classics, via a discussion of the phrase fortunae uultum … meae (Tr. 1.1.105 – grounding Ovidian exile as a phenomenon of persona rather than person), we hit the stride around p. 11. This will be a story about speech loss: an obvious component of many Ovidian tales, and no shrinking violet in previous scholarship. N. slots in his contribution by treating the theme of speech loss not as a silent protest of the historical Ovid in exile, but as a way of constructing an exilic persona/identity. So far, nothing particularly revolutionary. And no sooner is that claim made than N. seems to pedal back from it: we can indeed access authorial intent or historical poet through ‘a form of psychoanalysis’ (p. 14). This big word is dangled incidentally without any hope of following through, but the promise that we can get somewhere deeper than the persona is at least cashed out (very differently) in the final chapter on memoria, where suddenly Ovid-real-poet-man is back in the hot seat. By ‘psychoanalysis’ N. may well have been gesturing towards his more substantial claim to novelty beyond combination of speech loss and exilic persona: the use of a ‘schema’ framework, hacked from cognitive linguistics, to make sense of speech loss and its conceptual partners (e.g. the non-human, loss of community). But that framework itself turns out to be little more than window-dressing over a fairly traditional study in trans-Ovidian intertextual patterning. The book turns out ‘schematic’ – but perhaps not in the way N. would want.

The first chapter rolls us through the larger contemporary ‘discourse’ of speech loss in Rome. N. sets the background music with Aristotle and Vitruvius, loci classici for articulate speech dividing humans from the beasts. Next, N. folds in a brief introduction to schema theory (schemata being the cognitive frames or units that help us make sense of the world). The rest of the chapter is spent documenting the particular speech-loss schema through a systematic rinsing of various deployments of mutus across contemporary(ish) Latin literature. N.’s point is that mutus is usually reserved for speechless animals, so when used of humans, it inevitably bundles shades of the ‘non-human’ and ‘emotionality’. N. launches the discussion by citing the OLD definition (ploddingly reprised for memoria, p. 142), but he picks only a sliver of the lemma; consequently, he works with a mutus schematised into a Venn diagram of animals/animalised humans, which the word does not quite deserve. N. breaks it all down with a cripplingly simplistic cognitive mind-map, whose wording ‘when I read the term mutus … I think of …’ (p. 23) brings it more into the genre of scrap-paper scribble than academic book.

Chapter 2 gets us into the Ovid reading, which is where the book's meat and value lie. N. takes us through a select gang of characters from the Met. who lose speech and lose human community with the loss. The first part doles out the particularly devastated and unredeemed cases, wherein the schema linking speech loss to animalisation and alienation is fairly strictly observed: Lycaon, Callisto, Actaeon, Dryope, Echo. The reading of the last is particularly strong, showing Echo's dive from special articulacy (uocalis) down the natural order into unintelligibility (making sonus). The second part moves onto the speech-spayed characters who manage to overcome their impediments by other means: namely, writing, and namely, Io and Philomela. N.’s account of both these speech-loss-transcendence myths is solid, and there is a good case for the critical role of writing in Io's return to form. As for Philomela, more special pleading (naivety?) is needed to argue that the communicative redemption of the written tapestry rises above the horrific rape and traumatic disfiguring – all for the consolation (booby) prize of turning into a swallow.

Chapter 3 applies the twisted version of the schema (speech loss – but writing gain) to Ovid in exile. N. reads competently through Tr. 1.3, Ovid's flashback to his last night in Rome – turning the poem into a glimpse of the exilic conditions ahead (loss of speech/community). Decent intertextual practice scaffolds the argument here; N. marshals Aeneid 2's exile on the way out, as well as the familiar figures from Chapter 2 (Callisto, Philomela, Dryope) to catch incipient speechlessness in 1.3 (which then plays out nicely in 1.2 and 1.4). Philomela becomes particularly valuable as a model for writing as substitute. N. spots traces of her, from strong to invisibly faint, in much of the exile poetry; the reprise of common single words such as clausus and cruentus (pp. 111–12) does not make for a watertight intertextual case. He then presses on to show how writing becomes Ovid's main tool in overcoming speech loss and brokering a fold back into the absent community. S. Gurd's work on revision (Work in Progress: Literary Revision as Social Performance in Ancient Rome [2012]) helps spotlight how that social practice functions as a means of virtual rehabilitation for our poet shivering on that cold coast, where no one can hear him scream.

Finally, N. caps the book with the big question: why the speech-loss schema? His answer comes through the currently unavoidable mouthpiece of ‘memory’. For N., the big threat of speech loss is also the prospect of being swamped into the forgotten or remembered in the wrong way. The exile poetry becomes a way of wresting the memory of Ovid's exile back into his own hands, and away from those who would remember it differently (e.g. Augustus and other grumps). Three poems (Pont. 1.9, 2.4, and back to the opener Tr. 1.1. [cf. pp. 6–7]) are called up to show Ovid reclaiming his exile and attempting to disseminate it among whatever scraps of literary community are left to him. The argument as a whole works fine, even if the intertextual details drummed up in support are usually pretty tenuous (resting as above on fairly common single words, e.g. ludere). The logic of pars pro toto may not be quite enough to justify N.’s statement that he has shown, from just these three poems, that ‘the concept of memoria is pervasive throughout the exile literature’ (p. 169). But perhaps the problem with memoria is that it is all too pervasive and meaninglessly so. Is there any poet who could not fit into the usual scheme of self-memorialisation N. sketches out for Ovid (granted: beefed up in Ovid's exilic case); and do we really need the memory-mongers M. Halbwachs, A. Assmann and their biggest Classical pusher K. Galinsky to pad what is a fairly basic point?

The core theme (if not scheme) is worth a book. But the materia needed more intellectual heavy-lifting, and more ruthless revision. Even the slightest glance towards the huge literature on the ontology of speech vs writing would turn up that the latter was never in antiquity a straightforward consolation for the lack of the former. The theoretical shallowness and reductionism are not really offset by the more workaday modes of intertextual reading, which tend to rest on rickety props. No sign, also, of some obvious comparisons even within the Ovidian corpus (e.g. Feeney on speech and silence in the Fasti – D.C. Feeney in A. Powell [ed.], Roman Poetry and Propaganda in the Age of Augustus [1992], pp. 1–25). Then there is the steady stream of stylistic and typographical blips, not to mention the monotonous recycling of keywords (‘community’ in almost every second sentence). The monograph itself could have used some therapeutic aphasia. There are interesting murmurs here – but as a book, just not enough to write home about.