ABSTRACT
In mythograohy as in most other fields of scholarly endeavor, Renaissance England lagged far behind the Continent. This had not always been the case. The important twelfth-century handbook of "Al beri cus Londonensis" provides evidence that in the cosmopolitan world of pre-Reformation scholarship English mythography was the equal of anything produced in Italy, France, or Germany. By the sixteenth century, however, the situation had altered. European mythographers, building on the work of their predecessors and stimulated by the humanist revival of classical studies, pushed their discipline to a level of sophistication beyond which the tradition which scarcely permit it to go. By contrast, English mythography, insofar as it existed at all, consisted of only a handful of works, most of them slight and unsophisticated and sometimes revealing only a superficial knowledge of classical mythology and of the centuries-old mythographical tradition in Europe.
