Le Livre de Boece de Consolacion (review)

Glynnis Cropp's longstanding research on the medieval French reception of Boethius's De consolatione philosophiae culminates in this invaluable edition. While several other medieval French translations are already in print, the one she has chosen to edit is especially important because it was the most widely disseminated in the late fourteenth through the fifteenth centuries, being the one known (for example) to Christine de Pizan. It is also significant because it transmits an elaborate set of rubrics (including a prefatory table) and glosses (both long and short) deriving not from the Dominican Nicholas Trevet, whose gloss seems to have been well known in the fourteenth century, but from the twelfth-century Neo-platonist William of Conches. This Boethian text, then, is replete with philosophical and theological elaborations which chime with the Platonizing and theologizing reception of Boethius by fifteenth-century poets (e.g. Chartier, Lemaire de Belges). Unusually, the Livre de Boece also follows Boethius in combining prose and verse, Boethius's varied metres being rendered uniformly as octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It may, however, owe this feature in part to an earlier French translation to which it appears indebted. Indeed, like most medieval texts, this one is something of a patchwork since it has also borrowed the prologue by Jean de Meun to his translation. In her Introduction, Cropp charts the development of the Livre de Boece from its first unfinished form, through the full text (c. 1350- 1364), to the late fourteenth-century glossed text, and describes the complex tradition of over 60 manuscripts to which these various forms gave rise. Her edition is based on eight carefully selected exemplars. Including the table of rubrics, the medieval text occupies some 200 pages of this volume with textual notes, rejected readings and variants taking up another 130. There is an interesting Appendix that provides a variant sets of rubrics and establishes the correlation between the Livre de Boece glosses and those of William of Conches. The volume is rounded off with an Index of Proper Names, Glossary and Bibliography. This is a major work of scholarship and an indispensable tool for anyone working not just on the medieval Boethius but on the poetry and thought of the fifteenth century.