Damnanda non est obscuritas poetarum. Poetische Dunkelheit als Symptom einer Sprachkrise? – Das Zeugnis von Boccaccios ›Genealogia deorum gentilium‹

The ambiguity of storytelling, practiced in Boccaccio’s ‘Decameron’, has been explained as a symptom of the linguistic crisis to be observed in 14th-century epistemology (Kurt Flasch). The present article confronts this approach with Boccaccio’s concept of obscuritas as developed in his mythographic treatise ‘Genealogia deorum gentilium’. In book XIV Boccaccio defends obscuritas as a method of poetic garment (palliare, velamentum) in the tradition of the medieval integumentum theory. Besides this, he locates fiction in the judgement of the poet and refers the origins of poetry to the ‘wilderness’ of early human religion and myth. A key term in this context is the ‘peregrine’ character of poetry (carmina peregrina) expressing the untameable qualities of myth and literary fiction, effective across the ages. In this sense, obscuritas atque ambiguitas, as practised in the ‘Decameron’ and reflected in the ‘Genealogia’, enable Boccaccio to respond to, what Kurt Flasch calls the linguistic crisis of the 14th century.