ABSTRACT
Thomas Walsingham, the Benedictine monk best known for his chronicle accounts of events in England in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, paused in the middle of writing a history of the Trojan War to parse a matter of poetic invention. Walsingham's defense of poetry echoes that found in Boccaccio's De genealogia deorum, an early 1370s encyclopedic description of the gods of antiquity that concludes with a sustained discussion of the merits of literary falsification. Boccaccio's Genealogia is often considered to be one of the first works of scholarship of the Italian Renaissance. It was one of the first books that Humfrey, duke of Gloucester, gave to Oxford in 1469, and—closer to Walsingham's time—the text was at the Visconti library, but it was nearly unheard of in England in the late fourteenth century.
