Medieval Mythography, Volume 3

The Emergence of Italian Humanism, 1321-1475

Jane Chance

• Publisher: University Press of Florida
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780813055060
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Folklore & Mythic Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

With this volume, Jane Chance concludes her monumental study of the history of mythography in medieval literature. Her focus here is the advent of hybrid mythography, the transformation of mythological commentary by blending the scholarly with the courtly and the personal.

Chance's in-depth examination of works by the major writers of the period—including Dante, Boccaccio, and Christine de Pizan—demonstrates how they essentially co-opted a thousand-year tradition. Their intricate narratives of identity mixed commentary with poetry; reinterpreted classical gods and heroes to suit personal agendas; and gave rise to innovative techniques such as "inglossation," the use of a mythological figure to comment on the protagonist within an autobiographical allegory. In this manner, through allegorical authorial projection of the self, the poets explored a subjective world and manifested a burgeoning humanism that would eventually come to full fruition in the Renaissance.

No other work examines the mythographic interrelationships between these poets and their unique and personal approaches to mythological commentary.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations and Citation Editions
• Chronology of Medieval Mythographers and Commentary Authors
• Introduction
• Chapter One. Toward a Subjective Mythography: Allegorical Figurae and Authorial Self-Projection
• Chapter Two. Dante’s Self-Mythography: The Inverted Ovid “Commentary” of the Commedia (1321) and Its Family Glosses
• Chapter Three. “Iohannes de Certaldo”: Self-Validation in Boccaccio’s “Genealogies of the Gods” (ca. 1350–75)
• Chapter Four. Franco-Italian Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea (1399–1401): A Feminized Commentary on Ovid
• Chapter Five. Christine de Pizan’s Illuminated Women in the Cité des Dames (1405)
• Chapter Six. Coluccio Salutati’s Hercules as Vir Perfectus: Justifying Seneca’s Hercules Furens in De Laboribus Herculis (1378?–1405)
• Chapter Seven. Cristoforo Landino’s “Judgment of Aeneas” in the Disputationes Camaldulenses (1475)
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index