The shades of Aeneas: the imitation of Vergil and the history of paganism in Boccaccio's Filostrato, Filocolo, and Teseida (review)

144 Reviews eclectic Cranmer, MacCulloch progresses through a discriminating assessment of Calvin's restricted impact upon the English, towards a balanced appreciation of the Puritan tradition as firmly within the Elizabethan mainstream. In perhaps the most accessible short summary available of the debates between covenanters and 'proto-Arminians' over edification, predestination, and salvation, MacCulloch alone justifies the purchase price, and rounds it off with a sound discussion of the partial creation of a reformed church leadership, law, and ministry within a structure less reformed than the Roman Catholic by 1600. MacCulloch's ability to summarise the cunent state of historiographical play on these issues, and his carefulness in assessing the strengths and weaknesses of arguments from which he dissents, is fully stretched in the final section on the hotly debated c o m m o n reception of the Reformation. This question, like the earlier debate over 'Puritanism' which spawned it, is unlikely to be resolved to anyone's satisfaction, since it will inevitably metamorphose into still newer areas of enquiry. But, meanwhile, we have this discriminating summary. Pre-Reformation highland and lowland England displayed different patterns of devotional life, reflecting underlying differences in parish structure and control. The Reformation exacerbated these differences, and the competing arguments of A. G. Dickens, Christopher Haigh, and Patrick Collinson have yet to escape the limitations of their contrasting evidential bases. What may emerge, unlooked for, are two reordered worlds, one sanctified by either competing faith, the other religiously indifferent. Between principled Catholic dissent, here seen despite Haigh's best efforts as more survivalist than CounterReformation revivalist and principled Protestant dissent shading into separatism and sectarianism, here taxonomically ordered, the Church of England straggled with varying success against a world beyond religion, an alternative youth culture persisting through the Christian centuries. After all, not everyone is attracted by the spectacle of a dog walking on its hind tegs. Glyn Parry Department of History Victoria University of Wellington McGregor, James H., The shades of Aeneas: the imitation of Vergil and the history of paganism in Boccaccio's Filostrato, Filocolo, and Teseida, Athens (Georgia) and London, The University of Georgia Press, 1991; cloth; pp. ix, 133; R.R.P. US$30.00. This luminous volume is concerned with the particular fate of R o m a n classical epic typology in the 1330s at the hands of a neophyte Itatian poet Boccaccio, who, living beyond orthodox culture, was yet able to create a series of classicizing romances concerned with illuminating the major themes of ancient Rome's greatest poem: tbe Aeneid. The Augustan world is presented both as Reviews 145 long past in its paganism, and yet as timeless in its concern to probe man's continual struggle with his own passions, in particular when he is caught between pietas, or acceptance of ordained duty, and furor, the unbridled indulgence of selfish passion. James McGregor had earlier argued in his The image of antiquity that throughout these three early works Boccaccio described most carefuUy the religious practices of the classical world. In the present study he maintains that this was done in order to make statements about the difference between the classical past and Boccaccio's own Christian era. Thus the fourteenth century writer is shown to have an epic approach shared with Dante and with the poets of the high Renaissance. So understood, Boccaccio's work provides a most helpful bridge between Augustan epic and the secondary (national) epics produced in Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Once this is proved, Boccaccio's work illumines remarkably such treatments of secondary epic as the influential comparative studies of the late Professor C. S. Lewis and Sir Maurice Bowra. By a close yet stimulating textual analysis of each of these works by Boccaccio, McGregor is able to find medieval agreement with many of Vergil's views on heroism and its role in history, yet also an equally sharp rejection of the pagan notion that individuals can achieve the good life through their own efforts. Thus like Dante, as Robert Hollander showed well in 1983 in his // Virgilio dantesco, Boccaccio has exposed the limitations of Vergil's vision and its essentially tragic nature, for all its...