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Giovanni Boccaccio was an Italian writer, poet, correspondent of Petrarch, and an important Renaissance humanist. He was known par excellence as the Certaldese, and one of the most important figures in the European literary panorama of the fourteenth century. Some scholars define him as the greatest European prose writer of his time, a versatile writer who amalgamated different literary trends and genres, making them converge in original works, thanks to a creative activity exercised under the banner of experimentalism.
A family tree, or pedigree chart, is a chart representing family relationships in a conventional tree structure. The more detailed family trees used in medicine and social work are known as genograms.
A demogorgon is a deity or demon, associated with the underworld and envisaged as a powerful primordial being, whose very name had been taboo. Although often ascribed to Greek mythology, the name probably arises from an unknown copyist's misreading of a commentary by a fourth-century scholar, Lactantius Placidus. The concept itself can be traced back to the original misread term demiurge.
Philip the Good was Duke of Burgundy from 1419 until his death. He was a member of a cadet line of the Valois dynasty, to which all 15th-century kings of France belonged. During his reign, the Burgundian State reached the apex of its prosperity and prestige, and became a leading centre of the arts. Philip is known in history for his administrative reforms, his patronage of Flemish artists such as van Eyck and Franco-Flemish composers such as Gilles Binchois, and the capture of Joan of Arc. In political affairs, he alternated between alliances with the English and the French in an attempt to improve his dynasty's powerbase. Additionally, as ruler of Flanders, Brabant, Limburg, Artois, Hainaut, Holland, Luxembourg, Zeeland, Friesland and Namur, he played an important role in the history of the Low Countries.
Renaissance Latin is a name given to the distinctive form of Latin style developed during the European Renaissance of the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries, particularly by the Renaissance humanism movement.
Hugh IV was King of Cyprus from 31 March 1324 to his abdication, on 24 November 1358 and, nominally, King of Jerusalem, as Hugh II, until his death. The son of Guy, Constable of Cyprus, and Eschiva of Ibelin, Hugh succeeded his father as Constable of Cyprus in 1318, and later succeeded to the throne of Cyprus on the death of his uncle Henry II, since Henry II had no son. He was a member of the House of Poitiers-Lusignan.
Aricia is a name appearing in Virgil's Aeneid in a context that makes it possible for it to be interpreted as referring to a mythical personage:
Ibat et Hippolyti proles pulcherrima bello,
Virbius, insignem quem mater Aricia misit...
Leontius Pilatus was a Calabrian scholar and was one of the earliest promoters of Greek studies in Western Europe. Leontius translated and commented upon works of Euripides, Aristotle and Homer including the Odyssey and the Iliad into Latin and was the first professor of Greek in western Europe.
Ludovico Lazzarelli was an Italian poet, philosopher, courtier, hermeticist and (likely) magician and diviner of the early Renaissance.
Genealogia deorum gentilium, known in English as On the Genealogy of the Gods of the Gentiles, is a mythography or encyclopedic compilation of the tangled family relationships of the classical pantheons of Ancient Greece and Rome, written in Latin prose from 1360 onwards by the Italian author and poet Giovanni Boccaccio.
Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro OESA was an Augustinian monk who was at one time Petrarch's confessor, and who taught Boccaccio at the beginning of his education in the humanities. He was Bishop of Monopoli in Apulia. He was surnamed, not uncommonly for the trecento, for the town in which he was born, now Sansepolcro in Tuscany. His family name was de' Roberti, which no longer exists. Dionigi is the Italian form of Dennis, Latin Dionysius.
Theodontius was the author of a now lost Latin work on mythology. He was extensively quoted in Giovanni Boccaccio's Genealogia Deorum Gentilium, but is otherwise almost unknown. Boccaccio says that he knew Theodontius's work through the Collections of Paul of Perugia, which Paul's wife burnt after his death. In telling the legend of Bathyllus, however, Boccaccio complains that Theodontius was illegible except for Bathyllus's birth, from Phorcys and a marine monster, so he may have seen some of Theodontius's own writings; sources disagree on this. Some authorities think Boccaccio invented him.
Paolo Dagomari da Prato (1282–1374), known in Latin as Paulus Geometrus, was a noted Florentine mathematician and astronomer, such a maestro dell'abbaco that he gained the epithet Paolo dell'Abbaco. Franco Sacchetti called him Paolo Arismetra e Astrologo and Giorgio Vasari Paulo Strolago or Paolo Astrologo (astronomer). He reputedly had 6,000–10,000 pupils over the course of his life, being praised by contemporaries like Giovanni Gherardi da Prato, Filippo Villani, and Giovanni Villani in his Cronica.
Jean Miélot, also Jehan, was an author, translator, manuscript illuminator, scribe and priest, who served as secretary to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy from 1449 to Philip's death in 1467, and then to his son Charles the Bold. He also served as chaplain to Louis of Luxembourg, Count of St. Pol from 1468, after Philip's death. He was mainly employed in the production of de luxe illuminated manuscripts for Philip's library. He translated many works, both religious and secular, from Latin or Italian into French, as well as writing or compiling books himself, and composing verse. Between his own writings and his translations he produced some twenty-two works whilst working for Philip, which were widely disseminated, many being given printed editions in the years after his death, and influenced the development of French prose style.
Robert Kay Gordon (1887–1973) was an English scholar of medieval and early modern English literature and administrator at the University of Alberta in Canada.
Contact between Geoffrey Chaucer and the Italian humanists Petrarch or Boccaccio has been proposed by scholars for centuries. More recent scholarship tends to discount these earlier speculations because of lack of evidence. As Leonard Koff remarks, the story of their meeting is "a 'tydying' worthy of Chaucer himself".
Danaë is a series of at least six versions of the same composition by Italian painter Titian and his workshop made between about 1544 and the 1560s. The scene is based on the mythological princess Danaë, as -very briefly- recounted by the Roman poet Ovid, and at greater length by Boccaccio. She was isolated in a bronze tower following a prophecy that her firstborn would eventually kill her father. Although aware of the consequences, Danaë was seduced and became pregnant by Zeus, who, inflamed by lust, descended from Mount Olympus to seduce her in the form of a shower of gold.
Vincenzo Cartari was a mythographer, secretary, and diplomat of the Italian Renaissance, studied by Jean Seznec and scholars of the Warburg Institute.
Thomas Berthelet was a London printer, probably from France. His surname was also variously spelt Berthelot and Berthelett. Berthelet was to become King's Printer and King's Bookbinder for Henry VIII. His name was Englished as "Bartlett".
The Discovery of Honey by Bacchus is a painting by Piero di Cosimo from c. 1499. It depicts the god Bacchus and the discovery of honey, as described in the ancient Roman poem Fasti by Ovid. It is in the collection of the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts.
References
Giovanni Boccaccio, Genealogia Deorum Gentilium (Venice, 1472), Book XVI, chapter VI.