Description: Much more than a mere compilation of pagan myths, Boccaccio's Genealogy of the Pagan Gods incorporates hundreds of excerpts from and comments on ancient poetry. It is both the most ambitious work of literary scholarship of the early Renaissance and a demonstration to contemporaries of the moral and cultural value of studying ancient poetry.
Brief description: Jon Solomon is Robert D. Novak Professor of Western Civilization and Culture and Professor of the Classics and of Cinema Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.