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^The sentence is Boccaccio's. From his Genealogiæ deorum gentilium, a book on which he worked for about four decades. According, thus, to him, those elegant, nay, beautiful, even dandies who spend their lives interpreting the laws -which, anyway, Boccaccio despises because they are not universal, and because they only require from you to have good memory- consider tha poetry is something that should be applauded, but that poets, well, they are poor and that poetry cannot bring them any wealth. Any other day, I will talk about those particular people, the splendidi legum interpretes. There is another chapter about them.

It is difficult for me to focus on one single chapter of my book. As always, I read (a lot) and write (less) in a completely chaotic order, jumping from chapter to chapter, from book to book, from problem to problem. It actually does make sense, insofar as one readings supposedly oriented to a particular chapter actually enlighten parts of a different one. Although the basic research has been done -I have my catalogue of manuscripts, early printings, and other texts I would like to work on, and I have read them all, consulted them all, described them all-, the first moments of the actual writing of the book are covered by a mist -that of the order. The intellectual sensation is odd, because it is a mix of abundance of ideas and scarcity of words and concepts. I mostly fill up short filing cards (electronic, mostly) with more or less random ideas, linked to books or texts. In the last few hours, those filing cards have been more interesting, because they were metaphors that would help me understanding some ideas for which I did not have non-tropic words.

The very last one has also led me to the chapter I would like to be working on in a more ordered fashion during the next few days. The question I am proposing for this chapter (or, at least, for one of the parts, probably the first) of this chapter is this: why is it that many mythological narratives in 15th Century texts are confined to the margins. This also means that the central text, or the text, simply, as medieval writers call it (text as opposed to glossi) abounds in some kind of mythological references, but that these are only explained, only actually told in the margins. And here is where Boccaccio, among others, come.

In order to understand this, I imagined a metaphor, and I wrote it down on a file card. It tells as follows:

'A text is like a city, a space of hope (Harvey, Rorty). Whatever happens, happens in the urban tissue, in its streets. I suppose I am thinking of the urban movements, the practice of space, and the acts of speech (de Certeau). But the fact is that the city is also substracted from space by means of its walls (Max Weber). The walls of the text-city are the white space between the central text and the marginal outskirts. What happens in the outskirts has been pushed there by some kind of forces. What kind of forces are they? This I don't know yet. But for a second, I can continue pushing this metaphor. I shan't use it later, I will probably never write it in the pages of my book, but here, in the private research journal, I am allowed to push it as much as I want, with no constriction whatsoever. Imagine that some different processes of 'gentrification' have happened within this city-text. One of them has happened with a very special citizen called poetry. It has two differenent stigmata: first, it is grounded upon fiction; second, it does not represent any kind of economical development, neither public nor private. Some philosophers have banned it from the city. Plato's authority has used to support such an anti-poetic position. But the polemic is larger and more 'medieval', inasmuch as there is a certain amount of treatises that expel poetry -id est, the pagan mythographers, mainly- from the christian republic.'

There, more or less, I finished writing my filing card, essentially for lack of more space. Filing cards are small, and you cannot just let your pen go forever. In a different filing card, I wrote some sketches about the debate on poetry, Vincent de Beauvais asking the readers (probably himself) to read the classical poetry "sine voluptate" -whithout getting any pleasure from it, etc. On the other hand, thus, there is a whole host of writers explaining how to read the classical poetry, like, among many others, saint Basile in his De Libris Gentilium Legendis, or, obviously, the staunch defence of poetry undertaken by Boccaccio himself at the end of his Genealogiæ. Again, the debate is large. And I do not wish to simply re-read it. There is an important bibliography on the subject.

I will stay on my metaphor, and, thus, analyze some of the texts that, by expelling the classical poetry to the margins, actually create another city, every bit as fabulous as the central one, where they can narrate something that happens in the white separation between the city and the outskirts, these strange walls where the new poet's voice live.

[For the sake of information, the texts I will be exploring in this chapter will be, above all those by Pedro de Avis, Christine de Pizan, Juan de Mena, Enrique de Villena, Diego de Valera, Boccaccio, Nicolas de Gonesse an some probably anonimous glosses to the Elegia di Madonna Fiammeta].