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Boccaccio's Defence of Poetry; as Contained in the Fourteenth Book of the de Genealogia Deorum

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Elisabeth Woodbridge
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Extract

The work in which his Defence of Poetry occurs, the De Genealogia Deorum, was first suggested to Boccaccio while he was yet a young man, by Hugo, king of Cyprus. Hugo sent to the young poet, asking him to write a work upon the mythology of antiquity, there being no such book then in existence. Boccaccio seems to have been by no means eager for so tremendous a task, but urged on by his royal patron he at last began it, and continued to work on it at intervals, though the king who had originally set him the undertaking did not live to see its completion. Completed, indeed, it never really was, and it was without the author's knowledge and against his wishes that the manuscript passed out of his hands before it had undergone revision. This accounts in part for the desultory character of the work, its diffuseness, its repetitions, its lack of arrangement and subordination; only in part, of course, for something of all this—that, namely, which corresponds with the essentially undiscriminating, non-selective mind of the author himself—could not have been eliminated by any amount of revision.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 13 , Issue 3 , 1898 , pp. 333 - 349
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1898

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References

Note 1 in page 333 Fol. p. 359. The references throughout are to the edition of 1532, Basileae, Io. Hervagius.

3341 P. 360.

Note 2 in page 334 Cap. vii, fol. pp. 360, 361.

Note 1 in page 335 P. 361.

Note 2 in page 335 Cf. Inferno, ix; Convito, ii, 1; Lett. Can Grande della Scala; Petrarch, Epist. Rer. Fam., x.

Note 3 in page 335 Burckhardt, Renaissance in Italy, Part III, Chap. iv.

Note 1 in page 336 P. 364. The Latin is: “ Cum Communia sint.”

Note 1 in page 337 P. 362.

Note 2 in page 337 Epist. Rer. Fam., x.

Note 3 in page 337 Cap. viii, p. 362.

Note 1 in page 338 P. 363.

Note 2 in page 338 P. 364.

Note 3 in page 338 Pp. 364, 365.

Note 1 in page 339 P. 366.

Note 2 in page 339 Ibid.

Note 1 in page 340 Ibid.

Note 2 in page 340 Cap. xi.

Note 3 in page 340 Cap. xii.

Note 4 in page 340 P. 369.

Note 5 in page 340 P. 370.

Note 1 in page 341 P. 370.

Note 2 in page 341 Cap. xvii.

Note 3 in page 341 P. 376.

Note 1 in page 342 Ibid.

Note 2 in page 342 Ibid.

Note 3 in page 342 Cap. xviii.

Note 4 in page 342 P. 376.

Note 1 in page 343 P. 377.

Note 1 in page 344 Pp. 378, 379.

Note 2 in page 344 Cap. xix.

Note 3 in page 344 P. 384.

Note 1 in page 345 Cf. D. Comparetti, Virgil in the Middle Ages.

Note 2 in page 345 Cf. A. Hortis, Studii sulle Opere Latine del Boccaccio, p. 208.

Note 1 in page 346 Cf. Comparetti; Voigt, Die Wiederbelebung des Glassischen Alterthums, i, p. 30; Hortis, op. cit., p. 209.

Note 2 in page 346 Epist. Rer. Fam., x.

Note 3 in page 346 Ibid.

Note 4 in page 346 Pp. 210, 211; 219.

Note 1 in page 347 Augustine, Confessions, i, xiii.

Note 2 in page 347 Boccaccio, Comento, Lez. iii.

Note 3 in page 347 Modern Language Notes, Vol. vi, p. 97 f.