Petrarch, who lives in the memory of most people nowadays chiefly as a
great Italian poet, owed his fame among his contemporaries far rather
to the fact that he was a kind of living representative of antiquity,
that he imitated all styles of Latin poetry, endeavored by his
voluminous historical and philosophical writings not to supplant but to
make known the works of the ancients, and wrote letters that, as
treatises on matters of antiquarian interest, obtained a reputation
which to us is unintelligible, but which was natural enough in an age
without handbooks.
It was the same with Boccaccio. For two centuries, when but little was
known of the 'Decameron' north of the Alps, he was famous all over
Europe simply on account of his Latin compilations on mythology,
geography and biography. One of these, 'De Genealogia Deorum,' contains
in the fourteenth and fifteenth books a remarkable appendix, in which
he discusses the position of the then youthful humanism with regard to
the age. We must not be misled by his exclusive references to 'poesie,'
as closer observation shows that he means thereby the whole mental
activity of the poet-scholars. This it is whose enemies he so
vigorously combats--the frivolous ignoramuses who have no soul for
anything but debauchery; the sophistical theologian, to whom Helicon,
the Castalian fountain, and the grove of Apollo were foolishness; the
greedy lawyers, to whom poetry was a superfluity, since no money was to
be made by it; finally the mendicant friars, described
periphrastically, but clearly enough, who made free with their charges
of paganism and immorality.
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