The Legacy of Boethius in Medieval England: The Consolation and its Afterlives ed. by A. Joseph McMullen and Erica Weaver (review)

This elegant volume derives from a conference held at Harvard in 2014, "Revisiting the Legacy of Boethius in the Middle Ages." Recent editions of the Old English Boethius, both by Susan Irvine and Malcolm Godden, have certainly refreshed the study of Boethian reception in early medieval England, making the volume a timely addition to a wave of interest. The volume is equally timely in its ambition to cross the early period/late period divide in medieval studies. The essays are evenly divided between the two periods, anchored by the Old English translations associated with Alfred the Great and Chaucer's Boece, respectively, but embracing as well the lesser known Boethian treatments of Thomas Hoccleve, Thomas Usk, and John Walton. The contributors represent a healthy mix of ranks, and the essays are, almost without exception, of the highest quality. The volume is carefully edited, with a comprehensive introduction.

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius was the author of numerous learned works representing the highest learning of late antiquity, but he was and is best known for the Consolation of Philosophy, penned while awaiting execution by Theodoric the Ostrogoth in 524 CE. This work, a dialogue in verse and prose (a prosimetrum) in which Philosophy leads "Boethius" toward the chilly comforts of Neoplatonism, was read throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance and translated into the vernacular in every epoch, including Old English in the ninth century (Alfred the Great), Middle English in the fourteenth century (Geoffrey Chaucer), and Early Modern English in the sixteenth century (Queen Elizabeth I). The Consolation's promise of wisdom in the face of suffering certainly resonated with readers throughout the medieval period, as did its accommodation between "natural" (pagan) philosophy and Christianity. In the last few decades scholars have also focused renewed attention upon the way the form of the Consolation, its heterogeneous alternation of verse and prose, may have suggested itself in particular ways to readers who were interested in questions of translation and in literary theory—specifically, in the problem of how supposedly transcendent truths could be rendered and communicated in the sensible world. This aspect of the Consolation's medieval reception is amply represented in the present volume.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the collection is the editors' desire to bridge the early medieval/late medieval divide, labeling its two sections "Earlier Medieval England" and "Later Medieval England" in order to "argue for a reassessment of the medieval English Boethian tradition as a 600-year continuum in reading and readership" (p. xii). Calls for a reassessment of the field divisions in medieval studies and for attention to neglected periods such as the centuries immediately following the Norman Conquest have become frequent as well as urgent in recent years, and the editors' capacious scope reflects this growing consensus. Yet the tweaking of the nomenclature ("Earlier"/"Later") while maintaining the traditional two-period division does seem at once to revise and reinscribe the status quo. One never does get a sense, after the introduction, of a continuum truly spanning that 600 years. At most, a reader gets a vivid idea of the approaches to translation and to literary form at play in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, a sense of "continuum" in the range of uses of words like sentence and substance (Taylor Cowdery), of figures such as personification (Anthony Cirilla), and of the ethical possibilities of verse (Eleanor Johnson). This is because the essays in the "Later" section gesture across time to consider, in general, both comparative or diachronic perspectives and the broader implications of fine-grained analysis. The essays in the "Earlier" section, in contrast, while learned, restrict themselves on the whole to more traditional philological and source studies methodologies, which entail limited foci and a limited sense of literary-historical implications. One...