ABSTRACT
Giovanni Boccaccio’s Genealogie Deorum Gentilium Libri, written between the 1350s and 1370s, is both the apex of the medieval genre of mythography, as inherited from Fulgentius and the third Vatican Mythographer, and a watershed in the self-conscious humanist labor of retrieval and renewal of classical civilization. As such, Boccaccio’s euhemerism is akin to an ethnography according to which he can understand ancient religion as the product of willed creative acts to communicate meaning – as a product of poetry, or fabulous discourse. More clearly than any other of the gods, in Boccaccio’s explications, the figure of Mercury develop layers of meaning that build upon themselves across time and space, cutting across socio-political and geographical barriers and linking the natural with the cultural. or early Christians, the geographical and temporal expansion of idolatry in antiquity was a matter of primary concern.
