Remembering Boethius: Writing Aristocratic Identity in Late Medieval French and English Literatures by Elizabeth Elliott (review)

Elizabeth Elliott’s book presents a study of late medieval Boethian narratives in the vernacular—French, English, and Scots. Elliott leaves aside more obvious and more frequently studied translations and adaptations of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, and concentrates on literary works that are less self-evidently Boethian, by authors such as Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, Thomas Usk, and King James I of Scotland. She identifies a particular concern with what she calls the “Boethian discipline of memory” (146) across her corpus, and argues that the texts examined “take the Consolation as a model for narratives that address similar, contemporary experiences of the political misfortunes of exile and imprisonment” (13).

The introduction begins by providing a broader overview of the cultural resonance of Boethius’s Consolation, its translations, and adaptations in late medieval vernacular culture, with particular emphasis on its popularity with aristocratic readers. Chapter 1 focuses on Machaut’s Confort d’ami, read not only as a piece of consolation addressed to Machaut’s patron, Charles of Navarre, but also as a work that fulfills an ethical purpose by providing what Elliott calls “Boethian political counsel.” Chapter 2 continues this exploration by turning to Machaut’s Remède de Fortune, and examines its discourses on love and desire as a means of Boethian consolation. Chapter 3, the final one on Machaut, turns to the Fonteinne amoureuse, and focuses on motifs of imprisonment as tropes for the Christian, post-lapsarian existential condition. The chapter explores the use of such images as a means of consolation addressed to Machaut’s patron-prisoner, Jean, duke of Berry. Chapter 4 is on Froissart’s Prison amoureuse, and examines how the experience of captivity of another patron, Wenceslas, “is imaginatively recast as a Boethian education, through which he develops the ability to imprison himself through the pleasant exercise of discipline” (94). Chapter 5 turns to Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love, proposing a transcendentalizing reading that departs from recent interpretations to argue that “Usk’s Testament presents a powerful image of the completion of a visionary process of self-development that leaves its subject endowed with the internal stability that characterises the subject able to work towards the establishment of a social justice that prefigures the divine” (122). Chapter 6 turns to James I’s Kingis Quair, arguing that the poem’s “evocation of mnemonic practices of invention is in sympathy with the conception of the Consolation as depicting a process of therapeutic meditation that entails the exercise of the faculty of memory” (126).

A number of interesting points are made in this book, but there are numerous problems at the level of argument, conceptualization, focus, and style. While the study promises to explore the relevance of Boethius for the construction of aristocratic identity, much of the book reads like an extended series of observations on the theme of memory in medieval culture, with special attention given to Boethius and the texts that comprise the study’s corpus. It would have been helpful to provide a separate chapter defining what the “Boethian discipline of memory” really is—i.e., how it differs from mnemonic traditions more broadly and how it is specifically relevant to the construction of aristocratic and political identity—before moving on to the discussion of the actual texts. More seriously, the question of literary self-representation or self-fashioning does not receive the attention it needs: the introduction duly acknowledges that the term pseudo-autobiography “superimposes an anachronistic horizon of generic expectations on texts whose indistinct and mobile forms evince a fluid sense of self” (2), but the question is evoked only in order to be evacuated. No alternative terminology is proposed, and no sustained theoretical discussion of subjectivity, self-representation, or identity construction is provided anywhere in this book. Here, too, a chapter or an extended section would have provided a far more solid basis for subsequent chapters to rest on.

Given that the...