Boccaccio’s Naked Muse; Eros, Culture, and the Mythopoeic Imagination by Tobias Foster Gittes (review)

REVIEWS 295 and Louis the German was differentiated in their liturgy, diplomas, coinage, and seals. While Lothar used imperial elements and Louis the German relied on the appeal to his military elite, Charles the Bald had both the benefit and blessing of a strong clergy who made particular claims. At the Councils of Meaux and Paris (845–846) they called themselves vicars of Christ, and anointment was now the prerogative of bishops. Charles used the liturgy effectively, yet he also emphasized his authority by right of succession. There is a small problem in the imbalance of the evidence, so that most emphasis in the later period is on Charles. A minor problem is that audience resistance must often be inferred from changes in the message, although Garipzanov gives several examples of changes made on the basis of new personnel at court. Surviving evidence mostly derives from the chancery of the court, the highest levels of the clergy, or monastic scriptoria. The political body was already relatively small, but with these sources even the political elite of the aristocracy are silent. However, Garipzanov is well aware of the challenges of his difficult subject, and handles the methodological and theoretical challenges as adroitly as he does the technical demands of each specialized field of source material. Good historiographical essays on each field appear at the beginning of each chapter, and extensive appendices as well as photographs of coins and manuscript images are provided for reference. Overall he provides a thought-provoking approach to the intangible but significant elements that form the symbolic language of authority. LEANNE GOOD, History, UCLA Tobias Foster Gittes, Boccaccio’s Naked Muse; Eros, Culture, and the Mythopoeic Imagination (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2008) xii + 370 pp. With Boccaccio’s Naked Muse, Tobias Foster Gittes sets out to describe, in detail, Boccaccio’s attraction to and undertaking of myth building throughout his works. Gittes undertakes the complete re-orientation of the myth of Boccaccio as a light-hearted, literarily inclined author with no real claim to the deeper humanist thought processes so easily accepted in Petrarch, by clearly laying out the numerous moments of active myth-building present throughout Boccaccio’s texts. Gittes’s work is divided into four chapters, “Universal Myths of Origin: Boccaccio and the Golden Age Motif,” “Local Myths of Origin: The Birth of the City and the Self,” “The Myth of a New Beginning: Boccaccio’s Palingenetic Paradise,” and “The Myth of Historical Foresight: Babel and Beyond,” each of which is further subdivided, delineating specific paths. The work also contains an impressive number of illuminating notes, a thorough index, and a comprehensive bibliography. Another important feature of the text is its inclusion of translations for essentially all of the foreign language texts throughout the work, leaving the reader in a position to continue along Gittes’s journey without having to pause to translate any of the numerous quotes. The introduction to the book clearly lays out the program that Gittes plans to follow, and introduces a Boccaccio often left unconsidered by modern scholarship . The book moves from the general to the specific with ease, not just within each of the chapters, but as a whole. The first chapter, “Universal Myths of Origin” sets the stage for the rest of Gittes’s work, slowly introducing us to a REVIEWS 296 new Boccaccio. The classical models of Golden Age motifs are clearly presented , followed by Boccaccio’s constant attempts to balance asceticism, rationalism , and sensualism within a Judeo-Christian framework where ignorance doesn’t equal saintliness. The constant reconfiguring of the past into something with present relevance is a constant theme throughout the book and helps to clarify some of what are generally perceived as inconsistencies within Boccaccio ’s work. Chapter 2, “Local Myths of Origins,” narrows the scope of Boccaccio’s mythopoetic exercise somewhat, by focusing on the origins of Florence, Fiesole, and Certaldo. Here Gittes highlights Boccaccio’s insistence on miscegeny, discussing the “seminal role of racial, social, and cultural mixing” (22). Again, we’re drawn along a path that illuminates Boccaccio’s source material and reminds us of the vast amount of humanist knowledge that infuses all of Boccaccio ’s writings. Gittes also...