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By Root 2810 0

the most dynamic verse form in Italian literature. His Decameron, second only to The Divine Comedy as a source of delight for Renaissance Europe, is a product of the Black Death of 1348. The author has seven young women and three young men flee from Florence to escape infection. They remain in the countryside a fortnight, ten days of which are spent storytelling, making one hundred tales in all. Each story ends with a canzione, or song. It is thus a compendium of stories and verse, which less inventive spirits would ransack for inspiration over the next two centuries. The church and the stiffer element of society did not like it, for it represents the more liberal approach to lifestyles and opinion of the younger generation, contrasted to the formalities and stuffiness of the past. The rest liked it for precisely this reason. It is thus a “progressive” book, the harbinger of a growing Renaissance trend.

Boccaccio exhibits a characteristic Renaissance ability to do a great many different things, all with skill and panache. He served as a municipal counselor and as an ambassador on numerous occasions, to the pope and in Germany; he was a man of the world and courtier, but also a scholar as well as a writer. His energy was prodigious and his output vast. For nearly forty years a team of Italian scholars has been producing a massive collective edition of it, with a full critical apparatus, revealing perhaps for the first time the scale and range of his work. His first novel, Filocolo, once dismissed as a minor work, is actually more than six hundred printed pages and was read all over Europe. He wrote nine other considerable works of fiction in Italian. He produced in homage a life of Dante, which circulated widely in various editions and abridgments. But he drove himself far more deeply than the master into the emerging corpus of antique literature. Between 1360 and 1362, he gave lodgings to Leonzio Pilato, and got him made reader in Greek at the Studio, the old name for the University of Florence. He saw to it that Pilato made a rough translation into Latin of Homer, the means whereby he and many others (including Petrarch) began their journey into the Greek literary classics. He helped the process of recovering authentic texts of Martial, Apuleius, Varro, Seneca, Ovid and Tacitus. Indeed, the rediscovery of Tacitus was mainly his doing. He translated Livy into Italian. He produced a number of reference works, including two massive classical encyclopedias. One is a topography of the ancient world, listing all the places such as woods, springs, lakes and seas mentioned in Greek and Latin literature, arranged alphabetically. To do this he used the elder Pliny, various Roman geographers like Pomponius Mela and Vibius Sequester, and the classical texts, descanting rapturously for example on Virgil’s birthplace at Petola.

More important still was his great compilation The Genealogies of the Pagan Gods, which sorted out all the confusing deities referred to in the classics of antiquity. Sometimes he misread or misunderstood texts, thus producing pure inventions, like Demogorgon, who went on to pursue a vigorous life of his own. But most people eager to understand the literature of the past found these volumes godsends. They became mines of information and inspiration not just for scholars and writers but, perhaps even more so, for artists looking for subjects. By writing at such length about the pagan deities, Boccaccio risked falling foul of the church, and defended himself by saying that the men and women whom the pagans worshiped were not gods at all but merely exceptional humans whose exploits had been immortalized by endless recounting. They thus posed no threat to Christian theology. In fact, like so much else of the material supplied by the Renaissance recovery of antiquity, Boccaccio’s work constituted a real challenge to the Christian monopoly of the incidents that artists portrayed. Up to the second half of the fourteenth century, their subject matter was almost entirely Christian. They continued, of course, to use episodes