Mythography in Europe, 1500–1567

In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, there were several collections and editions of earlier mythographies available, but these books often drew attention to the need for new mythographies to be written. The first phase of the renewal of the mythographical genre came in humanist miscellanies, in which sophisticated indexes allowed readers to look up all the latest information on a specific god. In the middle of the sixteenth century, there then emerged a series of large-scale, Italian mythographies by Giraldi (1548), Cartari (1556), and Conti (1567). Each of these mythographies specialized in one of the three key aspects of Renaissance mythography: etymology, images, or allegory. Unlike the English works, all of these continental mythographies were educational tools that were designed to be used as reference works, and not to engage in political or religious debates