References to Boccaccio in parentheses specify the book and section of the Genealogia deorum gentilium. I used the edition translated, introduced, and edited by Charles Osgood which contains only the poetic theory contained in the XIV and XV books under the title Boccaccio on Poetry. Numbers in brackets indicate endnotes.
Most medieval
literary theory is couched in the language of rhetoric, inherited from ancient
authorities like Cicero, Quintilian, the
Rhetorica ad Herennium, and the Rhetorica ad Alexandrum. Works by Matthew of Vendôme,
Geoffrey of Vinsauf, and John of Garland focused on figures of speech, thought,
and sound, a tradition continued in the Renaissance by scholars like Puttenham
and Peacham. Many moderns are
unsympathetic to such an approach as it eschews the emphases on originality,
individuality, and inspiration we have inherited from the Romantics. Yet ancients and moderns alike assert poetry’s
special capacity to embody the truth. Whereas
rhetoric is linked with sophism and often suspected of subverting piety and
moral order (by Plato and others), poetry has since archaic times been thought in
some sense divine and the source of knowledge, spirituality, and moral
behavior. Many ancient authors accepted the
Horatian formula that poetry must delight and instruct [1], and, indeed, some
modern critics [2] maintain the idea that reading literature makes people better,
not merely wiser, but more moral.
The concern with
theme, what the writer implies about lived experience, and the idea that poetry
can uplift readers spiritually, morally, and intellectually is central to
Boccaccio’s defense of poetry against critics to whom all non-Christian art is
frivolous and probably sinful. To him
even the pagan poets are sources of religious knowledge, albeit with vision limited by not knowing
Christ (XIV, 8). “Poetry devotes herself
to something greater [than pursuit of money]; for while she dwells in heaven,
and mingles with the divine counsels, she moves the minds of a few men from on
high to a yearning for the eternal, lifting them by her loveliness to high
reverie” (XIV, 4). While they lack the inspiration
the Holy Ghost lent sacred writers, they are similarly elevated by “mere energy
of mind,” for which reason they are called “seers” (XIV, 8). To him all literature is “a form of discourse
which, under guise of invention, illustrates or proves an idea” (XIV, 9). Poets are then “stimulators of virtue” (XIV,
15) and their works are “maidservants of Philosophy” (XIV, 18). They may be at time obscure (XIV, 12), and
their words may bear multiple meanings [3] (XIV, 12), but these difficulties serve
the representation of complex truths.
For him the “sap of Philosophy” runs throughout imaginative literature
(XIV, 10). In his grand (if irritable) polemical
style, those who cannot see the real meaning in poetry are denounced as “fools,”
“madmen,” “blind,” idiots,” and the like.
The basis for his
analysis is the claim that myths, like poetry, are always allegorical, in the
broadest sense of saying something other than the literal content. This is the nature of rhetorical figures as a
whole, and for Boccaccio myth always signifies something other than the
apparent meaning. Fiction is for him “far from superficial”; it possesses
always a “hidden truth” (XIV, 9). For
him the primary exception to literature’s noble role is certain comic writers
whom he repeatedly dismisses as altogether pernicious, really sub-literary.
Boccaccio’s
defense of poetry occurs in the prefaces to the fourteenth and fifteenth books
of his magnum opus, the Genealogia deorum gentilium (On the Genealogy
of the Gods of the Gentiles) a massive attempt to set forth systematically
the entire body of Classical mythology. Boccaccio
clearly regarded this as his magnum opus.
He expanded and revised the book over a period of fifteen years until
his death, and it proved popular then for several hundred years. The text was copied as a whole in forty-seven
manuscripts and in part in many more.
The printed editio princeps appeared in 1472, followed by at
least seven other editions in Latin before
1532 as well as translations into modern European languages. Neglected now, it was long his best-known work.
Boccaccio’s
ambition for this fifteen-volume work of scholarship goes well beyond providing
information in a convenient form. The understanding of Classical mythology for
him was far more than a source of ornamentation for poets; it was a route to
truth. Whereas Thomas Bulfinch and Edith
Hamilton primarily wished to make allusions explicable to modern readers,
Boccaccio saw in myth something truer than true, something sublime and
transcendent. Mythic systems are all
encyclopedic; they aim to account for all phenomena. This is true of Babylonian, Egyptian,
Germanic, Yoruba, and Hindu myths as well as those of ancient Greece and
Rome. Though their truths are always
symbolic and poetic, they are nonetheless accurate. Thus to master a mythological system is, in
theory, to understand the world. This
all-inclusive hunger for vision explains why the book is so long and
complex. Long before the nineteenth
century higher criticism distinguished between the J, E, and P versions of the
Hebrew god, Boccaccio had differentiated three different Joves.
Mythology is one
part of a program of Liberal Arts education, a term that yet survives though in
practice such general training has been largely displaced in higher education
by vocational courses. For Boccaccio a
Liberal Arts curriculum is required to develop “a wonderful keenness of mind” that leads
to “the very inner mysteries of sacred philosophy” (XIV, 9). Victorians justified the study of Classical
languages as a sort of calisthenics for the brain, a preparation for the sort
of problem-solving one encounters in everyday life, but for Boccaccio
familiarity with Greek and Latin literature provided enlightenment directly. In today’s decay of general culture and
wide-open dispute about values, with the crassest material index, money, by far
the most generally accepted, one might do worse than to immerse oneself in
Homer and Vergil.
Boccaccio was simply
following the taste of his day in seeking to salvage the beauties of ancient
poetry by claiming a moral purpose in the fanciful and sometimes racy stories
of the gods. In his own fourteenth
century the L’Ovide Moralisé appeared provided thematic
readings consistent with Christianity for the old stories of transformation. Other examples of this pervasive approach to
Classical mythology fill John Gower’s Confessio Amantis. Gower concludes his treatment of the story of
Actaeon (admittedly one of the stories more most amenable to a Christianized
interpretation) with this cautionary warming.
Lo now, my Sone, what it is
A man to cast his yhe amis,
which Acteon hath dere aboght
Be war forthi and do it noght.
(I,
379-382)
Many of the readings found there
are similar to Boccaccio’s commentaries.
Both for instance, see the story of Apollo and Daphne as a cautionary
tale warning against sexual indulgence and praising chastity and restraint.
The most common strategies Boccaccio
adopts are euhemerism and moralizing.
For instance, he first glosses the story of Antaeus whom Hercules
defeated by holding him in the air, out of contact with the earth, as an
account of a historical king who founded the city of Tinge (Tangiers) who was
so skilled at wrestling that he might be seen to draw strength from standing on
the earth. He then provides the ethical
reading, saying that the earth here signifies such “lower” impulses as lust
which can be defeated with discipline (I, 13).
Some of his notions are more fanciful than
others. Venus’ attendant nymph Peristera
may reasonably be considered to have been inspired by a “famous Corinthian
prostitute,” yet the association of her nymphs with “the perpetual moisture in
which the moon abounds” is pure whimsy, and no scholar would accept the
derivation of the goddess’ name from “venam rem,” “an empty thing” (V,
2). Yet even the more extravagant
interpretations are significant, of Boccaccio’s vision if not of the
ancients’. The reader might regard his
wilder speculations as the effervescence of intellectual ferment, not so different
from some inventive post-structuralist readings.
Moderns may lack the moral certainty that allows Boccaccio to distinguish “good muses,” “worthy of praise and reverence,” from “bad” ones, “obscene and detestable” (XIV, 20) [4], but many cling to the notion that literature improves the individual. As this defense of art has been asserted since ancient times and Boccaccio adds little to the claim, the primary interest of moderns in his analysis in the Genealogia is instead his argument on behalf of the study of myth, believing, in a medieval anticipation of commentators like Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, that such apparently fanciful and factually erroneous stories may encode profound wisdom and his broader belief that the study of the Liberal Arts exercises the mind in such a way as to elevate students’ behavior as well as their cognitive skills. To him the sublime, a moral as well as an aesthetic category, is accessible through the language of mythology and the stories of the ancients provide the most complete, beautiful, and true symbolic representation of reality.
1.
Though present in earlier writers including Aristotle, this dictum is
traditionally ascribed to Horace whose Epistle ad Pisonem states the
concept several times. “The poet strives
to delight and help, at the same time to be pleasant and serviceable” ("Aut prodesse uolunt aut delectare
poetae aut simul et iucunda et idonea dicere uitae."), “the useful and
the sweet mixed” ("miscuit utile dulci"), and "giving pleasure and admonitions"
("delectando pariterque monendo"). Sir Philip Sidney makes the same claim
central in his “Defense of Poesy” as do many writers such as Matthew Arnold
since.
4. It is more revelatory
about the Catholic Church and European culture than about poetry in general
that the main moral deficiencies Boccaccio notes seem to be sexual misdeeds.
