with Ovid. Thus, when the narrator of the poem says to the girl, da michi, queso, tua virginitate frui ("grant me, I beg, your virginity for my enjoyment"), the reader (or listener) is supposed to laugh at the play on Daphne's request that her father da mihi perpetua ... virginitate frui ("grant ... that I may enjoy perpetual virginity") in the Metamorphoses (I.486–87). Despite its Ovidianism and its early misattribution, the poem has the hallmarks of medieval composition, including a highly rhetorical style and Scholastic reasoning. The rhetorical devices do not translate easily and the English can sound stilted or redundant. Excerpts The opening lines of the poem are imitations of Horace (Satires, I.9: Ibam forte via sacra, "I chanced to be going along the Sacred Way") and Ovid (Amores, I.1, who also did not know at the outset to whom he would address his poem): I chanced to go down a road alone one day, and Love, just as usual, was my only companion. And as I walked, I was composing some verses, musing on a girl to whom to send the poems. The poet is quite pleased by the ideal size of his girl's breasts: I could not discern the shape of her breasts, either because they were too small or because they were bound up—girls frequently bind their breasts with bands, for too buxom a bosom men do not find enticing—but this girl, my girl, does not have to resort to such measures, for her bosom by nature is quite nicely small. Her lovely breasts were small, perfect for love (if a little bit firm, nonetheless just right for me). The author does not follow Ovid, who believed that women desire physical compulsion, rather he portrays the willing girl submitting to her lover out of desire: "Love, she said, do your will with me, do it swiftly, for black night is fleeing, day returning." Then she asked for my hand, and I stretched it out. She placed it on her breasts and she said: "What, my dearest love, do you feel now?" Bibliography Elliot, Alison Goddard (1984). Seven Medieval Latin Comedies. Garland Library of Medieval Literature, Series B, Volume 20. New York: Garland Publishing. . Rico, Francisco (1967). "Sobre el origen de la autobiografía en el «Libro de Buen Amor»." Anuario de estudios medievales, 4:301–325. Robathan, Dorothy M. (1932). "A Fifteenth-Century History of Latin Literature." Speculum, 7:2