TREE · Tracing Relations in Encyclopaedic Environments. Visualising mythological knowledge through Boccaccio’s Genealogical Diagrams

For centuries, humans have relied on diagrams to impose order on chaos, to shape memory, and to transmit complex knowledge. But how did premodern Europe use them to reorganise the intricate field of mythology? And what happens when such a diagrammatic system is devised not by a scientist or an artist, but by a writer, for whom words and images are equally tools of thought?TREE focuses on Giovanni Boccaccio’s Genealogia deorum gentilium, the earliest systematic attempt in Western culture to catalogue myth through both text and image. To guide readers through this labyrinth, Boccaccio created thirteen genealogical trees, a striking visual architecture inscribed in his autograph manuscript and later copied in nineteen manuscripts. Despite their centrality, these diagrams have never been critically edited or analysed as a whole, neither within Boccaccio scholarship nor in the study of diagrams. Today, these instruments that helped shape the way myths are still imagined remain confined to the silence of libraries.TREE brings these diagrams back to light through two complementary lines of action. First, it reintroduces them into scholarly debate by producing the first critical edition, which reconstructs their original form and traces their reshaping across manuscript transmission, and through a monograph that reassesses Boccaccio’s role in the history of visual knowledge. Second, it makes the diagrams accessible as cultural heritage to scholars, students, teachers, and the wider public through two channels: a digital platform, which integrates the edition with searchable metadata, interactive visualisations and educational resources, and an exhibition that presents the diagrams together with contemporary reinterpretations. Bringing together philology, book history, visual studies, and digital humanities, TREE shows how a fourteenth-century framework for visualising myth still speaks to contemporary ways of organising and understanding complexity.