The Legacy of Boethius in Medieval England
The Consolation and Its Afterlives
Edited by A. Joseph McMullen and Erica Weaver
Of all of the works of secular literature that survive from the European Middle Ages, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy (ca. 524) was the most widely copied, and the pervasiveness of its cultural influence is difficult to overstate. This study offers the first holistic survey of the re-workings of the Consolation in medieval England, bringing the Old English Boethius together with Chaucer’s Boece and a host of understudied interlocutors — including Lantfred of Winchester, Abbo of Fleury, Aelred of Rievaulx, Thomas Usk, Thomas Hoccleve, and John Walton — for the first time in a volume of this kind. Arranged into sections on “earlier” and “later” periods, The Legacy of Boethius argues for a reassessment of the medieval English Boethian tradition as a 600-year continuum in vernacular reading and readership.
The following scholars have contributed essays to this collection:
Ann W. Astell, University of Notre Dame
Anthony G. Cirilla, College of the Ozarks
Taylor Cowdery, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Nicole Guenther Discenza, University of South Florida
Hilary Fox, Wayne State University
Susan Irvine, University College London
Eleanor Johnson, Columbia University
A. Joseph McMullen, Centenary University
Haruko Momma, University of Toronto
Jonathan Stavsky, Tel Aviv University
Paul E. Szarmach, University of California, Berkeley
Erica Weaver, University of California, Los Angeles
More information here.