Lukasik Vladislava Yuliyanovna – Candidate in Philology, Associate Professor at the Department of History of Foreign Literature, Faculty of Philology, Lomonosov Moscow State University;
The article discusses a number of evolution stages of the concept of “fable” in medieval and early Renaissance literature. G. Boccaccio in his Genealogy of Pagan Gods creates a typology of “fables-myths”, correcting late antique and early Christian classifications. By highlighting “fables” that mix truth with fiction, Boccaccio connects the latter with “figures”. Arguing with Thomas Aquinas, he considers metaphor to be a divine rather than a mundane property of poetry and insists on the theological nature of the latter. Where medieval culture sees the need to interpret the “fable,” the early Renaissance returns to the ancient notion that the “fable” needs neither interpretation nor exposition.
Boccaccio; fabula; theology; fiction; figure.