In Folio: Rare Volumes in the Stanford University Libraries

Giovanni Boccaccio, 1313-1375.

Genealogiae Ioannis Boccatii, cum Demonstrationibus in Formis Arborum Designatis ….

Venetiis: Ductu & expensis nobilis uiri D. Octauiani Scoti ... finis i[m]positus fuit huic operi per Bonetum Locatellum, M.CCCC.XCIIII septimo Kalendas Martias [23 Feb. 1495].

Boccaccio is famous for his Decameron, written shortly after the outbreak of the Black Death in Europe (1348). He was also a Dante scholar, and by 1350, the year in which he met Petrarch, he was the undisputed literary leader of Florence. Seen here is his most influential scholarly work, the Genealogia, an assemblage of classical myths and legends from a variety of texts, analyzed by following the traditional fourfold distinction utilized in sacred hermeneutics: distinguishing between literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical senses of the texts. Boccaccio worked on the Genealogia for the last twenty-five years of his life. The last two books are a passionate defense of poetry, which Boccaccio sees as superior to grammar (unlike the earlier medievalists who would have ranked poetry below grammar), an inspired form of literature (as was fiction), but one that requires great diligence and effort to understand. This defense of poetry was enormously influential in Italy. English poets notably influenced by Boccaccio include Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dryden, Keats, and Tennyson.

 

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