Genealogia Deorum Gentilium

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Giovanni Boccaccio
Genealogia deorum gentilium, 1532

Genealogia deorum gentilium, known in English as On the Genealogy of the Gods of the Gentiles, is a

pantheons of Ancient Greece and Rome, written in Latin prose from 1360 onwards by the Italian author and poet Giovanni Boccaccio
.

The work is "humanist in spirit and medieval in structure".[1] According to the Preface Boccaccio undertook the project at the request of Hugh IV of Cyprus. The first version was completed in 1360, and he continuously corrected and revised the work until his death in 1374, so that various redactions of the works were copied in different manuscript traditions. In his lifetime and for two centuries afterwards it was considered his most important work.[2]

The full range of genealogies of the classical Gods are described in the fifteen books, drawing on the standard earlier works, especially the Liber imaginum deorum, a 12th-century treatise by the otherwise unknown Albricus (possibly Alexander Neckam), and the older so-called Vatican Mythographies. These themselves drew on the late antique Christian Fulgentius, and writers of the actual period of classical paganism, especially Ovid and Statius.[2] Some Greek material was probably supplied by his Greek teacher Leontius Pilatus.

According to Malcolm Bull: "...Boccaccio does his best to make sense of the complex genealogy of the gods. But as he also allows for several gods of the same name, the result becomes enormously confusing. No subsequent mythographer followed his method of organizing material, yet Boccaccio's Genealogia retained its prestige and was to remain the most important mythological manual until the late sixteenth century."[2] The next attempt at an equally comprehensive compilation on the subject of mythological genealogy would not come until 1548, when Giglio Gregorio Giraldi published his De deis gentium. The Genealogia was unkindly described by Edward Gibbon in his Decline and Fall as "a work, in that age, of stupendous erudition, and which he ostentatiously sprinkled with Greek characters and passages, to excite the wonder and applause of his more ignorant readers" and "a work which, though now forgotten, has run through thirteen or fourteen editions",[3] although in fact there is evidence that Coleridge and Wordsworth read it together.[4]

Boccaccio was responsible for spreading the story, which he credited to

Jesse tree in art.[5]

Book 1 Summary

Dies (deity). Mors (mythology), Somnus and Fraus
are other notable children of Erebus and Nox.

Summary of Book 2

Aether and Dies have 2 children,

Polyneices, Eteocles, Antigone and Ismene. With Argia, Polyneices became father of Thersander
.

Book 3

Caelus with his sister

Majestas. Styx was the mother of Cocytus who bore Phelegethon who bore Lethe. Vulcan I was the father of Apollo I with Minerva II, Mercury III with Venus I was the father of Hermaphroditus and Venus II was the mother of Cupid II
.

Book 4

Gigantomachia, Nephilim which included Nimrod and Goliath
, and a giant's skeleton recently discovered in Drepani which fell to pieces when it was touched.

The last two books of the work include a defence of poetry that is his latest and most extended discussion of the subject.

Translations

  • French: Jean Miélot 1468, produced for Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy
  • English: The first volume of a projected three-volume set titled Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, translated by Jon Solomon, was published in May 2011 by Harvard University Press under the I Tatti Renaissance Library imprint.[6] A second volume was released in October 2017.[7]

Printed editions

The first printed edition was in

incunabulum editions were published (including in 1497), and a French translation in 1498 or 1499. All survive in healthy numbers, confirming the popularity of the work, which was reprinted in many more 16th-century editions, some illustrated.[8]

References

  1. ^ Encyclopædia Britannica
  2. ^ a b c d Bull, op cit p.22
  3. ^ Part 4, Ch. 66 online text
  4. ^ Hill, Alan G;Wordsworth, Boccaccio, and the pagan gods of Antiquity; pp 32-5; Review of English Studies. 1994; XLV: 26-41
  5. ^ The Genealogy of the Genealogical Trees of the "Genealogia Deorum";Ernest H. Wilkins;Modern Philology, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Aug., 1925), pp. 61-65 JSTOR
  6. ISBN 9780674057104
  7. ISBN 9780674975590
  8. ^ Incunabula Short-Title Catalogue (ISTC), British Library
Notes
  • Boccaccio On Poetry, ed. Charles H. Osgood Princeton University Press, 1929; a translation of the Preface and books XIV and XV.
  • Malcolm Bull, The Mirror of the Gods, How Renaissance Artists Rediscovered the Pagan Gods, Oxford UP, 2005,
    ISBN 0-19-521923-6

External links
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