During the past twenty years, scholarly interest in mythography, and especially in Graeco-Roman writings about myth, has grown significantly. As fruits of this recent revival, several high-quality studies and translations of individual mythographers have been published (e.g. J. Stern's Palaephatus [1996], J.L. Lightfoot's Parthenius of Nicaea [1999] and M.K. Brown's The Narratives of Konon [2002]), besides some excellent up-to-date critical editions of neglected texts (e.g. R.L. Fowler's two-volume commented edition of early mythographers, Early Greek Mythography [2000-2013], P.K. Marshall's Hyginus [2002²] and M. Papathomopoulos' Apollodori Bibliotheca [2010]), and various monographs as well as edited volumes of more general scope (e.g. A. Cameron's Greek Mythography in the Roman World [2004], J. Pàmias I Massana's Parva Mythographica [2011] and S.M. Trzaskoma and R.S. Smith's Writing Myth [2013]).
The present volume seeks to develop this research subject still further: fifteen critical essays investigate some of the most influential mythographical works that were transmitted throughout history, from Western as well as Eastern antiquity over medieval Europe to early modern Japan, with special regard to the methods, the literary as well as political motivations, and ideological implications underlying these (sub)literary records of myth. Importantly, this volume is explicitly multidisciplinary, not only because its scope reaches beyond the traditional boundaries of Europe and the Mediterranean, but also because it brings together the insights of scholars from a wide range of disciplines, thus combining a variety of critical approaches.
Given its broad geographical and chronological scope, most papers included in the volume do not focus on Graeco-Roman mythography and are therefore not directly relevant to the readers of this journal. Various contributions deal, for example, with Celtic, Scandinavian and Eastern mythography. Four articles, however, do specifically focus upon Greek and Latin mythographical writings. First, ‘Packaging Greek Mythology’ by W. Hansen investigates the methods of four popular American and British compilations of Greek mythology of the past two centuries, to wit Bulfinch's Age of Fable (1855), E. Hamilton's Mythology (1942), R. Graves's The Greek Myths (1955) and H.J. Rose's Handbook (1929). By way of example, Hansen discusses the well-known narrative of the first woman Pandora, as related in two different versions by the archaic poet Hesiod. It turns out that the modern mythographers handled the myth with surprising and unannounced freedom: they implicitly opted for one particular version, or rewrote the myths in order to harmonise the competing versions; they added various details of their own to counter the lack of information in Hesiod, etc. Interestingly, this authorial freedom is likewise exploited in three visual representations of Pandora by British and American painters who are contemporaries of the modern mythographers in question, as each portrayal implies a particular motive for Pandora opening the vessel. Similarly, popular ancient mythographers, such as Pseudo-Apollodorus and Hyginus, appear to have manipulated the Pandora myth in order to fit it into their narrative framework.
Second, ‘The Myth Before the Myth Began’ by R. Martin aims to reconstruct the semantic history of the term ‘myth’, from its Homeric performative meaning of ‘authoritative utterance or speech-act’ to its Thucydidean static sense of ‘an unverifiable, and probably fictional, account of gods and heroes, supernatural beings, or distant ancestors’. Strikingly, however, within the literary framework of early mythography, the Homeric depiction of muthos-deployment turns out still to be predominant, as the figure of the sage advisor and the agonistic use of myths remain the main templates.
Third, ‘Starving the Slender Muse: Identity, Mythography, and Intertextuality in Ovid's Ibis’ by D. Krasne focuses upon Ovid's riddling curse poem Ibis, of which the second part (lines 251–644) consists of a lengthy and over-compressed catalogue of mythological exempla. Krasne vividly demonstrates the hidden structural coherence of this catalogue, and the pervasive parallelism and intertextuality between this poem and Ovid's other exilic work, and even his love poetry. Most importantly for our purpose, however, Krasne firmly establishes its link with the tradition of mythographical catalogues: Ovid's Ibis not only reflects this principal constituent of ancient mythography, but it ultimately confounds this tradition by reducing the mythological exempla far beyond simple comprehension as intended in mythographical prose.
Finally, ‘Medieval Latin Mythography as Death and Resurrection of Myth’ by J. Ziolkowski seeks to kindle the scholarly interest in medieval Latin mythography by presenting a synthetic, yet enlightening overview of the genre in this period. Among other things, Ziolkowski first gives a brief overview of the most important medieval representatives of the genre, including not only systematic treatises, but also sources containing only sporadic mentions of it – especially glosses and commentaries on Virgil – and less orderly presentations of mythological material, such as Martianus Capella's De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii. Further, he dwells on the medieval Latin terminology concerning myth, on the prominent position of mythography in education and on the demythologising tendencies of medieval allegorical and Neoplatonic interpretations of the ancient myths.
Notwithstanding the overall good quality of the individual articles, the volume misses both inner coherence and a solid methodological framework. The lack of inner coherence, on the one hand, is exemplified by the virtual absence of cross-references (except in the papers by N. and by Ziolkowski) and the editorial decision not to group the papers in distinct content-related clusters, even though there was plenty of opportunity to do so (e.g. Graeco-Roman, Celtic, Scandinavian and Eastern mythography). The absence of a solid methodological framework, on the other hand, is most tangible in the editor's preface, where one should expect a more in-depth scholarly discussion of various hotly debated issues, such as the definition of myth and the rather fluent concept of the mythographical genre. Unfortunately, this lack of an introductory state of the art likewise affects various papers. S.W. Jamison, for example, opens her paper by explicitly admitting that she is struggling to understand the term ‘mythography’ (p. 265), before she sets off to demonstrate the non-compliance of Indian mythology to the Western model of mythography. Similarly, Martin and Krasne simply assume that ancient mythography was a prose genre (p. 55 and p. 67 respectively). However, if one assumes, together with for example R. Fletcher (in The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women. Constructions and Reconstructions [2005], p. 301), that the core characteristic of mythography is not its prosaic form, but its systematic exposition, then the origins of the genre may well be in archaic poetic catalogues, such as Homer's Catalogue of Ships and Hesiod's Catalogue of Women.
The book is attractively printed and well edited, though a few typographical errors have crept into the text, especially in the footnotes. The volume closes with a very usable general index.
