Variants of the problem between poetry and theology in Giovanni Boccaccio

Abstract

This article analyzes the variants of the problem addressed by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) in his work The Genealogy of the Pagan Gods (1360), specifically in the last two books, XIV and XV, in which the references to the problem of poetry and theology are concentrated. From the synthesis between Greek and Christian thought, called by Werner Jaeger a philosophical "theology" that produced a reinterpretation of pagan or Christian traditions in the religions of late antiquity, to medieval Florence, in the midst of a preeminence of Christian mythology, where poetry is defended while a cultural renewal takes place that puts in crisis the limits between poetry and philosophy. The Genealogy has as the basis of its defense Cicero's sentence (which both Petrarch and Boccaccio present as the theory with which the Renaissance will begin) according to which poetry is of supernatural inspiration as opposed to art which is a technique and raises the possibility of recovering poets like Homer for Christianity, as scholastic philosophy would do with Aristotle, starting from a philological argument that Boccaccio uses to define that the etymological root of poetry is Greek and not Latin.