Category: English

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Wanda Bodnar, PhD Candidate, Marine and Estuarine Science, UCL

The Thames estuary in southeast England — the tidal stretch of the river — once supported extensive saltmarshes, seagrass meadows and oyster beds. These shallow areas, which flood and drain with the tides, provided vital feeding and nursery grounds for fish. But centuries of urban development have replaced them with concrete walls, docks and flood defences.

Much of this change happened in the Victorian era. The Thames embankment straightened and hardened the river’s edge, severing the natural connection between land and water. Today, barely 1% of those original intertidal habitats — the shallow zones between the low and high tide mark — remain. But while the physical landscape has continued to shrink, the condition of the water has taken a very different path.

Since the 1960s, water quality has improved dramatically, and more than 125 fish species have been recorded in the Thames river system. Some even spawn in the Thames. With stable oxygen levels and declining pollution, the river has made an impressive biological recovery — but not a physical one. Fish have returned, but the habitats they depend on have not. With so few natural areas left today, young fish have far fewer places to feed and grow than they once did.

Restoring life at the edge

To counter this loss, new aquatic habitats have been created across London over the past 25 years. The Estuary Edges project — led by the Thames Estuary Partnership with the Environment Agency and the Port of London Authority — shows how to soften hard riverbanks and make space for wildlife.

These created or “engineered” habitats come in many shapes and forms. Some are “setbacks”, where parts of the river wall are opened or moved back to allow tides to flood naturally. Others are gently sloping vegetated terraces. These are sections of hard wall or steep bank that have been reshaped and planted with aquatic and saltmarsh plants to recreate a more natural edge.

Even vertical walls can be improved by adding ledges and textured surfaces. These features give aquatic wildlife places to cling, feed and shelter.

Between 2017 and 2023, nine “estuary edges” sites were surveyed, from Barking Creek to Wandsworth in London. Using specialised nets, more than 1,000 fish were recorded — including gobies, seabass and the critically endangered European eel. Almost all were juveniles, showing that even small, vegetated areas can shelter young fish in the heart of London. The surveys also showed that design and time matter. Habitats with gentle slopes, channels and good water flow supported more fish. Sites with barriers or poor drainage often trapped water — and fish — on the falling tide.

At Greenwich Millennium Terraces, an area of the peninsula that was redeveloped in 1997, a natural drainage channel formed over the years. By 2023, the site supported mullet, flounder and many eels. At Barking Creek, a tidal channel that reformed after reed overgrowth restored fish access and increased diversity. The neighbouring setback site, built in 2011, kept water flowing throughout the tide and consistently supported gobies, seabass, flounder and eels.

These examples show that habitat creation works — but they also highlight significant knowledge gaps. Compared with decades of research on water quality, studies on habitat function remain limited, especially across different habitat types and levels of human impact.

Further downstream, the Transforming the Thames project is now scaling up restoration. Led by the Zoological Society of London, it focuses on the outer estuary, where there is more space to restore and reconnect habitats.

Together, Estuary Edges and Transforming the Thames offer complementary approaches to habitat recovery: creating new habitats along the urban river edge while restoring those lost across the broader estuary.

This connection underpins my PhD research. I study how fish use natural, degraded, created and restored habitats across the Thames. By combining environmental DNA with net surveys, diet analysis, and stable isotope techniques, I explore how fish feed, move and interact with different habitat types. This helps reveal how these habitats support fish — and how fish respond as restoration progresses.

Creating and restoring habitats is not only about helping fish and other wildlife. Shallow, plant-rich edges stabilise sediments, absorb waves, improve water quality and strengthen climate resilience. They also create peaceful “blue havens”: places where people can reconnect with the river.

Once declared “biologically dead”, the Thames has made a remarkable comeback. Its revival story, however, is still being written.

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This article draws on decades of research and collaboration across the Thames Estuary, made possible by the work of many individuals and organisations. I am especially grateful to Steve Colclough, whose long-standing work continue to influence restoration efforts across the region. I worked full-time at the Thames Estuary Partnership between 2018 and 2024, and I am now undertaking a NERC-funded PhD jointly hosted by Queen Mary University of London, the Institute of Zoology and University College London.

– ref. From concrete walls to living edges, here’s how riverside habitats are being restored along the Thames – https://theconversation.com/from-concrete-walls-to-living-edges-heres-how-riverside-habitats-are-being-restored-along-the-thames-269420

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Allison Wolfreys, Lecturer in Law, The Open University

The government is proposing a change in the law on parental child abduction. The crime and policing bill, under consideration in parliament, would make it a crime for a parent to take their child on holiday and then not return them at the end of the agreed holiday period. This would be punishable by up to seven years’ imprisonment.

The government is attempting to remedy what could be seen as a gap in the law. But this approach fails to take into account what we know about the situations in which this kind of parental child abduction occurs. In many cases, it involves a mother fleeing domestic abuse with her children.

Parental child abduction happens when a child is taken to another country without the other parent’s knowledge or consent, or when one parent takes the children abroad for a holiday and keeps them overseas beyond the agreed holiday period. Currently, the recourse for parents left behind is contained in the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of Child Abduction.

This was created with the objective of minimising harm to children. It enables the left-behind parent to apply to the court in the country the children were taken to for their prompt return. The Convention remains the primary legal instrument of response, with 103 signatory member states.

The crime and policing bill currently before Parliament will leave the 1980 Convention untouched but bolster criminal sanctions against parents who take children by amending the Child Abduction Act 1984, which applies to England and Wales.

The 1984 Act made it an offence for a parent to take or send a child out of the jurisdiction without the other parent’s consent. The parent who took the children is sanctioned only if police pursue a complaint made by the left-behind parent, which is then subject to a decision by the Crown Prosecution Service to prosecute.

Now, the government seeks to strengthen criminal sanctions against parents who fail to return children. But the proposed seven years’ imprisonment does not align with what research and practice tells us about parental child abduction in 2025.

Profile of the abductor

There was little hard statistical data available on parental child abduction when the Hague Convention was created. However, the abduction of children was primarily seen as something done by fathers who were not the primary carer of their children.

The picture is now very different. Research conducted in 2015 found that 73% of taking parents were mothers, an increase from earlier years, and of these 91% are primary carers. My research and that of other scholars has found that domestic abuse features heavily in these cases. Essentially, these mothers are taking their children and attempting to escape an abusive situation. Research suggests that domestic abuse may be present in approximately 70% of child abduction cases.

If this amendment proceeds, then mothers who have fled overseas with their children to escape an abusive relationship may refuse to return for fear of prosecution. But through the mechanism set up under the Hague Convention, the children can still be ordered to go back. This proposed change in law takes no account of the impact on children of criminalising the parent who will most often be their primary carer. The potential criminalisation of primary carers will inevitably compound the trauma for children at the centre of these cases.

The reasons for parental child abduction are multifaceted and complex. The forum for resolving family law disputes is the family court, and punitive criminal sanctions are likely to cause harm to children. Furthermore, the potential criminalisation of mothers in the context of domestic abuse flies in the face of current government policy to support victims of abuse. It also fails to prioritise the individual needs of children caught up in parental conflict.

It is disappointing to note that the House of Commons has to date given scant attention to this proposed change to the law. It was not debated at report stage (when MPs have an opportunity to consider amendments to a bill).

Currently there are several members of the House of Lords with expertise in family law. Now that the bill has reached committee stage – a detailed examination of each line – in the House of Lords, I hope that they will draw attention to this issue and persuade others that the change in law should be abandoned. These complex cases should be left to the family court where they properly belong.

Allison Wolfreys does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Parental child abduction: why extending criminalisation is not the answer – https://theconversation.com/parental-child-abduction-why-extending-criminalisation-is-not-the-answer-271019

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Ligin Joseph, PhD Candidate, Oceanography, University of Southampton

The final week of November was devastating for several South Asian countries. Communities in Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Thailand were inundated as Cyclones Ditwah and Senyar unleashed days of relentless rain. Millions were affected, more than 1,500 people lost their lives, hundreds are still missing, and damages ran into multiple millions of US dollars. Sri Lanka’s president even described it as the most challenging natural disaster the island has ever seen.

When disasters like this happen, the blame often falls on a failure in early warnings or poor preparedness. This was the case with major floods in Kerala, south India, in 2018, which devastated my hometown.

But this time, the forecasts were largely accurate; the authorities knew the storms were coming, yet the devastation was still immense.

So, if the forecasts were good enough, why were the impacts still so severe?

Weak winds, extreme rain

One emerging explanation is that these storms were not dangerous because of their winds, but because they produced unusually intense rainfall.

Consider Cyclone Ditwah. Its peak winds were around 75 km/h (47 mph). That’s windy, but nothing special. In the UK, it would be classified merely as a “gale” rather than a “storm”. It was far weaker than the 220 km/h winds of the powerful 1978 cyclone that also struck Sri Lanka. Yet Ditwah still caused massive devastation.

What explains this apparent contradiction? It’s too early to say definitively, but climate change is likely a part of the story. Even when storms are not especially strong in wind terms, the amount of rain they carry is increasing.

A warmer atmosphere holds more water

A well established meteorological rule helps explain why. For every degree of global warming, the atmosphere can hold about 7% more moisture.

As the planet warms, the air above us becomes a larger reservoir, waiting to dump more water on us. When storms form, they can tap into this expanded supply, often in extremely short bursts. Even if wind speeds are modest, the rainfall alone can be catastrophic.

The oceans matter even more

Warming oceans play an even more powerful role, as cyclones draw their energy from warm ocean waters. Satellite data from late November shows just how warm the eastern Indian Ocean was, with large areas more than 1°C above normal during Ditwah and Senyar.

Such warm anomalies are no longer unusual. The oceans have absorbed more than 90% of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases, and long-term observations show a clear upward trend in ocean temperatures.

That doesn’t necessarily mean cyclones are becoming more frequent – their formation still depends on other ingredients, such as low wind shear (small differences in wind speed and direction with height) and the right atmospheric structure.

What warmer oceans do change, however, is the amount of energy available to any storm that does manage to form. When the ocean is warmer, cyclones have more fuel and evaporation increases, loading the atmosphere with moisture that can fall as intense rain once a storm develops. Even weak cyclones can therefore hold exceptional amounts of rain.

The winds near the surface help this process along. As they move across the ocean, they sweep away the moisture-filled air just above the water and replace it with drier air, allowing evaporation to continue. Put together, warmer oceans, higher evaporation, and an atmosphere that can store more moisture, these factors can significantly intensify the rainfall associated with cyclones.

Coastline hugging makes flooding worse

Local geography amplified these effects. Both Ditwah and Senyar formed unusually close to land and travelled along the coastline for an extended period. This meant they stayed over warm waters long enough to continuously draw moisture, but remained close enough to land to dump that moisture as intense rainfall almost immediately.

Cyclone Ditwah, in particular, moved slowly as it approached Sri Lanka. Slow-moving storms can be especially dangerous as they repeatedly dump rain over the same area. Even if winds are weak, this combination of warm seas, coastal proximity and slow forward speed can be devastating.

A new threat

These storms suggest that climate change – especially ocean warming – is reshaping the risks posed by cyclones. The most dangerous storms may no longer simply be the ones with the strongest winds, but also the ones with the most moisture.

Forecasting systems, including new AI-powered weather models, are getting better at predicting cyclone tracks and wind speeds. Yet rainfall-driven flooding remains far harder to forecast. As oceans continue to warm, governments and disaster agencies will need to prepare for storms that may be weak in wind but extreme in rain.

These insights are based on preliminary analysis and emerging scientific understanding. More detailed peer-reviewed studies will be needed to pinpoint exactly why Ditwah and Senyar produced such extreme rainfall. But the pattern that is emerging – weak cyclones delivering outsized floods in a warming world – must not be ignored.

Ligin Joseph receives funding from the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).

– ref. Warm oceans seem to be turning even ‘weak’ cyclones into deadly rainmakers – https://theconversation.com/warm-oceans-seem-to-be-turning-even-weak-cyclones-into-deadly-rainmakers-271550

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Sam Power, Lecturer in Politics, University of Bristol

Nigel Farage has found himself in hot water over accusations that he failed to report that his 2024 election campaign in Clacton went over the spending limit of £20,660.72. Richard Everett, a former Reform councillor (who has since left the party – or been expelled, depending what you read), has submitted documents to the police.

Election spending in the UK is beyond complex. It is so hard to understand that it has been compared to a “Jane Austen-style intricate dance … all sorts of daring and dicey moves are permissible, provided you know precisely where to step and when, and how not to upset the crowds”.

Nowhere is this truer than when it comes to spending limits. There are, in fact, two spending limits for general elections (well, there’s actually more than two but let’s not go there). Each party has a certain amount to spend at the national level and each candidate has a spending limit for their constituency campaign. Candidate spending is money spent to promote their individual candidacy (or criticise a local opponent), party spending is more general material that promotes a party.

This is largely thanks to a historical quirk. Candidate spending has been limited since the Corrupt and Illegal Practices (Prevention) Act of 1883. And because national campaigning didn’t really exist back then, that was largely that. Things changed in 2000 when – alongside other reforms – limits were placed on national-level party spending, which by then was, by then, very much a thing.

Both spending limits vary, but the 20k limit for Clacton is a reasonable rule of thumb to extrapolate across other constituencies. Party spending limits, again as a rule of thumb, are £34.1 million (if a party stands across England, Scotland and Wales). So, quite a difference.

As you’d imagine, parties make all kinds of daring moves to get what looks an awful lot like candidate spending into their much larger national budgets. You might, for example, target national messages (so party spending) at target constituencies – and, as long as you don’t mention the candidate, that’s party spend.

You can still end up in hot water, though. Just ask the 30 or so Conservative MPs (and their staff) who were embroiled in an election expenses episode following the 2015 general election. In this instance the Tories drove a battle bus packed with activists drove around 33 target constituencies and reported most of their spending as party, rather than constituency, spending.

How bad is this for Farage?

With the police looking into the claim, there’s only so much one can say, but there are several reasons to think the Clacton spend is not going to be too much of a problem for team Farage. Firstly, there’s a very basic matter of the statute of limitations on cases of this kind. You only have a year to report suspected offences and we’re already more than a year out from the election.

While prosecutors can have that limit waived in certain circumstances, a further complication of electoral law is that candidate offences (for now) are managed by the police and party offences by the Electoral Commission. The police are very reluctant to get involved in party politics so it would be surprising if they actively pursued the case against Farage.

We also don’t know how much more than his £20k limit Farage is accused of spending. If it’s a small amount, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) may not feel it in the public interest to pursue a case.

The burden of proof is also incredibly high. I suspect that the offence the CPS will be investigating is the same as the Tory battle bus affair, so 82(6) of the Representation of the People Act 1983. This states that “if a candidate or election agent knowingly makes the declaration required by this section falsely, he shall be guilty of a corrupt practice”. So, the CPS does not just have to show the overspend, it has to show that the candidate knew they were overspending.

There’s also the complicating factor that this is Farage’s constituency, and he effectively is the Reform party. Given that he is the face of all Reform campaigning, we have to wonder, truly, in this instance where candidate spending begins and party spending ends. Or, put differently, considering how easy it would be in theory to disguise candidate spending at party spending in these particular (and peculiar) circumstances you’d. Election law is a complicated dance after all, but this is little more than a two-step.

These headlines come at a tricky moment for Farage as he has faced over a week of allegations that he made racist comments during his school days. That said, I doubt there’ll be any great panic in Reform HQ. For one, even Everett has suggested that Farage was “blissfully unaware” of the omissions. If charges are brought, it will likely not be against him and therefore easily blamed on his local agent or other administrators.

Also, as I suggested way back in 2016, accounting just isn’t very sexy. Again, the battle bus saga is instructive here as it was genuinely big news at the time. Some even thought it had the potential to become the new expenses scandal. But it didn’t. One person was convicted, while everyone else was acquitted and moved on.

Attacking electoral law is also fertile ground for Farage. He has already turned a defence over racism allegations into an attack on his opponents, there’s very little to suggest he won’t do the same here. He and his supporters generally relish the prospect of a skirmish with the establishment.

This would be, put lightly, a shame. Election law is hard to understand and mistakes happen, but that doesn’t mean those enforcing it are pen pushers looking for wrongdoing to punish. We may well live in the age of the politics of grievance and hot air, but just this once it would be nice to let the process play out.

Sam Power has received funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council.

– ref. Nigel Farage accused of breaking election spending laws – the situation explained – https://theconversation.com/nigel-farage-accused-of-breaking-election-spending-laws-the-situation-explained-271546

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Andrew Gawthorpe, Lecturer in History and International Studies, Leiden University

The White House has released its national security strategy, a document put out by every US presidential administration in order to spell out its foreign policy priorities. These documents are legally required to be released by Congress and are typically written by a committee. Still, they bear the president’s signature and usually serve as a distillation of how the current commander in chief views the world.

This latest document is no exception. But perhaps even more so than any previous national security strategy, it reflects a focus on the views and activities of the current president. It touts supposed achievements of the Trump administration in a way that would be more appropriate in a campaign speech. And at numerous points, it lavishes praise on Donald Trump for upending conventional wisdom and setting US foreign policy on a new course.

So what can we learn from this document about how Trump views the world? Three themes stand out. The first is that, contrary to some claims, Trump is not an isolationist. He doesn’t want to pull the US back from foreign entanglements completely. If he did, it would hardly make sense to boast of having brokered eight peace deals or of having damaged Iran’s nuclear programme.

Like more traditional national security strategy documents, the latest one still portrays the US as having a responsibility for global peace and prosperity. But within that broad remit, it has a new set of priorities.

The most striking is the focus on the western hemisphere. Whereas recent administrations have identified the containment of China as their key priority, Trump vows he will “restore American preeminence in the western hemisphere”. Yet the only concrete “threats” the document identifies as originating in the region are drug cartels and flows of irregular migrants.

Viewed from the standpoint of previous administrations, this makes little sense. US foreign policy has usually been concerned mainly with grave security threats, particularly from Russia and China. Drugs and migrants were less important than nuclear weapons and aircraft carriers.

Trump views things differently. From his perspective, dangerous narcotics and migrants who he has previously said are “poisoning the blood” of the US are much more direct threats to the American people. Putting “America First”, to use Trump’s favourite phrase for describing his own foreign policy, means focusing on them.

But this does not mean Trump is isolationist. Protecting the American people, even in the way Trump understands it, means having an active foreign policy.

The second key theme of the document is its attitude towards “civilisation”. In it, Trump has returned to a central aspect of his political rhetoric – that “western civilisation” is under attack from a combination of hostile migrants, spineless liberals and cultural degeneracy. Just as Trump appears to see himself as leading the fightback against these forces in the US, he wants others to do the same.

In passages that have sent shockwaves through Europe’s political establishment, the national security strategy lambasts European governments for allegedly welcoming too many migrants, persecuting far-right political parties and betraying the west’s civilisational heritage.

Again, these are not the words of an isolationist. They are the words of someone who, as I have concluded in my own research, views themselves as the protector of a racially and culturally defined civilisation that covers both the US and Europe.

The particularism here is striking. Whereas past US national security strategies spelled out a desire for Washington to spread liberal democracy throughout the world, Trump’s document says this is an unachievable goal. Instead, he seems to be interested primarily in the destiny of white Europeans – and in shaping their democracy and values to conform with his own.

The national security strategy warned that several countries risk becoming “non-European” due to migration, adding that if “present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognisable in 20 years or less”. This is a stance that some observers say echoes the racist “great replacement theory”, a comparison the White House has branded as “total nonsense”.

The third and final theme that stands out from the document is its intensely economic focus. The most detailed parts of the document relate to economic statecraft – how to reshore industries to the US, reshape the global trading system and enlist US allies in the mission of containing the economic rise of China.

Regional security matters, by contrast, receive much less attention. Russia’s ambitions in Europe are barely mentioned as a problem for the US, and Taiwan merits only a paragraph. Indeed, the Kremlin has said the new strategy is “largely consistent” with its vision.

Rarely has a US national security strategy been so transactional. In its discussion of why the US will support Taiwan, the document only invokes the island’s semiconductor industry and strategic position as reasons. Not a word is said about the intrinsic worth of Taiwanese democracy or the principle of non-aggression in international law.

The impression this leaves is that, in foreign policy, Trump prioritises economics over values. He views leaders such as China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin not as implacable dictators hell-bent on regional domination, but as possible business partners. He seems to believe the focus of foreign policy ought to be to maximise profits.

For US allies in Europe and Asia, this raises an uncomfortable question: what if the profitable thing to do turns out to be to abandon them and strike a grand bargain with Russia or China? Based on this document, they have little reason to think Trump will do anything else.

Andrew Gawthorpe is affiliated with the Foreign Policy Centre in London.

– ref. What the US national security strategy tells us about how Trump views the world – https://theconversation.com/what-the-us-national-security-strategy-tells-us-about-how-trump-views-the-world-271438

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Frances Myatt, College Teaching Associate (Peterhouse), University of Cambridge

Even if you haven’t heard of Ovid, you almost certainly know some of his stories. His most famous work, the Metamorphoses, is a Latin epic poem composed of hundreds of tales of mythical transformations, many of which are still being told and retold today.

Take Ovid’s story of the sculptor Pygmalion, who crafted an impossibly beautiful woman from ivory. After falling in love with his own creation, he prayed to the goddess Venus and she brought the statue to life. You can trace the echoes of this story through the centuries – from George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion (1913), which recast the sculptor as a speech therapist and became the musical My Fair Lady (1956), to Spike Jonze’s film Her (2013), which reimagines the tale for the AI generation.

The Pygmalion story was also recently retold from the statue’s perspective by Madeline Miller in her novella Galatea (2013), the name given to Pygmalion’s statue by later writers. With its unflinching descriptions of sexual abuse, Miller’s novella brings the darker aspects of Ovid’s tale into sharp focus.

Indeed, the Metamorphoses as a whole has had its own #MeToo moment in recent years. In 2015, Columbia undergraduates even argued that the book should have trigger warnings due to its many brutal rape scenes. However, while authors, journalists and academics are now all reckoning with Ovid’s disturbing fondness for scenes of rape, there is another, striking aspect of the Metamorphoses that we’re still overlooking – Ovid’s fascination with motherhood.

This article is part of Rethinking the Classics. The stories in this series offer insightful new ways to think about and interpret classic books and artworks. This is the canon – with a twist.

Mothers don’t normally belong in Latin epics, which were meant to be devoted to warriors and warfare. When mothers do pop up in epic poems, they’re immediately pushed away.

In Virgil’s Aeneid, for instance, Aeneas escapes from the ruins of Troy with his father and son – but tells his wife to follow behind, where she is lost and killed. Later, a grieving mother is hidden away in her tent, in case her tears dishearten the soldiers. But in the Metamorphoses, mothers are everywhere, even in the most epic of myths.

The 12 labours of Hercules is one of the most famous legends of the classical world – but Ovid spends far longer recounting the labours of Hercules’ mother, Alcmene. What is more, Alcmene narrates her labours herself, to her daughter-in-law Iole.

Latin literature expert Mairéad McAuley argues that this unusual first-person account of pregnancy and birth reimagines the epic tradition as an intimate exchange of knowledge between women, and it plays with both the idea of epic heroism and the question of what kinds of stories properly belong in the epic canon.

On an even more fundamental level, the world of the Metamorphoses is rooted in motherhood. After a great flood, the human race is renewed from “the bones of our great mother” – the stones of our mother earth. She then “gave birth” to all other animals, which grew in warm, wet mud “as though in the womb of a mother”.

Later, Mother Earth herself appears as a character in the poem, when the world is burning and she begs the king of the gods to save the earth from the devouring flames. It’s a passage that perhaps has even more resonance for us now than in Ovid’s time.

The transformation of motherhood

Motherhood is also present in the Metamorphoses in more subtle ways. =Alison Sharrock, a professor of Latin, has pointed out that Ovid uses the vocabulary of fertility and childbirth to describe Pygmalion crafting his statue. The story then ends with the newly alive statue giving birth to a daughter, Paphos, who gave her name to the Greek island.

Miller picks up on this in her novella, where Pygmalion creepily insists that he is Galatea’s “mother”, as well as “husband, and father”. However, Pygmalion can neither understand nor control Galatea’s true maternal love for her daughter. It is this love that drives her to escape, so that her daughter might be free from Pygmalion’s abusive power.

While Ovid gives a surprising amount of space to mothers, that doesn’t mean he was some sort of proto-feminist. His mothers are certainly powerful, complex characters – but they are also often figures of violence and destruction.

Medea, infamous killer of her own children, was one of Ovid’s favourite characters, and the star of the only play he ever wrote. While this play has unfortunately been lost over the millennia, he devotes half a book of the Metamorphoses to her – and Medea is far from the only murderous mother of the poem.

After Procne’s husband rapes her sister and tears out her tongue, she kills their son and serves the meat to her husband at the dinner table – a gruesome plot that inspired Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (1588).

In the final book of the poem, Ovid equates birth and metamorphosis, when the Greek philosopher Pythagoras preaches a doctrine of reincarnation, claiming that “what is called being born, is just beginning to be something else”.

This speech of Pythagoras looks back to the very beginning of the poem, when Ovid says that he will tell of “bodies changed into new forms”. And what change is more dramatic than pregnancy and childbirth, when the mother’s body metamorphoses, and one body becomes two?

Beyond the canon

As part of the Rethinking the Classics series, we’re asking our experts to recommend a book or artwork that tackles similar themes to the canonical work in question, but isn’t (yet) considered a classic itself. Here is Frances Myatt’s suggestion:

The stand-out modern poet of motherhood and metamorphosis is unquestionably Fiona Benson. Her collection Vertigo & Ghost was awarded both the Forward Prize and the Roehampton Prize in 2019.

The first half of the collection explicitly reworks tales from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Here, motherhood offers moments of loving care and affection amid the sickening brutality of Ovid’s repeated rapes, reimagined in modern settings.

While the second half of the collection doesn’t overtly rewrite Ovidian myths, it is nonetheless equally Ovidian in character. Benson glides seamlessly between the human and animal worlds, with childbirth acting as a key thread that links the poems together.

In Wildebeest, particularly, motherhood is unambiguously portrayed as a form of metamorphosis. Benson describes how “I became beest” while giving birth, slipping between human, animal, water, metal and star, in a glorious profusion of transformation, as dramatic and poetic as any Ovidian metamorphosis.

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Frances Myatt has received research funding from the University of Cambridge and the Caroline Fitzmaurice Trust.

– ref. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is all about mothers – https://theconversation.com/ovids-metamorphoses-is-all-about-mothers-266383