The Erotics of Consolation: Desire and Distance in the Late Middle Ages (review)

Medievalists know that Boethius's De consolatione philosophiae was one of the most widely read and influential texts of the Middle Ages. However, in recent decades this influence has all too often been simply acknowledged rather than explored, and the essays in this volume — devoted to texts in a range of vernacular languages — therefore offer a welcome, timely, and stimulating reassessment and reassertion of Boethius's centrality to medieval studies, focusing in particular on the core Boethian conceit of consolation itself. In addition to essays on Chaucer, Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Johannes von Tepl, and the reception and use of Boethius in late medieval and early modern English courts, the volume contains four essays that sit squarely within the field of French Studies: Sarah Kay's 'Touching Singularity: Consolation, Philosophy and Poetry in the French dit'; Adrian Armstrong's 'Yearning and Learning Spaces of Desire in Jean Lemaire de Belges' Concorde des deux langues (1511)'; Helen Swift's 'Tamainte consolation / me fist lymagination: A Poetics of Mourning and Imagination in Late-Medieval dits'; and Catherine Léglu's 'Maternal Consolatio in Antoine de la Sale's Le Réconfort de Madame de Fresne'. Kay's starting point is how later medieval poets like Froissart, Christine de Pizan, and Machaut responded to the alternation of, and tension between, verse and prose in the Consolatio; she argues that they seem to have found poetry more consoling than prose, as well as a better vehicle for philosophy, which amounts more to a paradoxical reworking of Boethius than slavish imitation. The merits of this essay are not confined, however, to its reading of the French texts, for the first ten pages consist of an utterly lucid and characteristically crisp exposition of Boethius's thought and style in the Consolatio that students of medieval literature at any level will find helpful and rewarding. Armstrong uses a Lacanian framework not just to illustrate Lemaire de Belges's debt to Boethius, but more importantly to show how his Concorde seeks to negotiate a position between Imaginary and Symbolic orders in order to console its author with the prospect of literary posterity. Swift explores the relation between mourning and consolation in a number of dits by Froissart, Le Franc, Chartier, and Machaut, suggesting that the theme is often a means of exploring imagination and literary creativity, an argument inspired in part at least by Derrida's work on loss and projection into the future in Spectres de Marx. Finally, Léglu's focus in her analysis of La Sale's Le Réconfort is gender: she argues that identification with maternal loss and suffering become emblematic of a Levinasian ethical compassion that transcends social, psychic, and temporal boundaries. The essays in this unusually coherent volume are all theoretically astute and substantive interventions on the texts they discuss (apart from those on French topics, I would particularly recommend Jessica Rosenfeld's on Troilus and Criseyde, Stephen Milner's on Boccaccio, and Mark Chinca's on von Tepl); cumulatively, perhaps they will encourage others to reread Boethius and to rethink medieval rereadings of Boethius.