Chaucer and the Consolation of Prosimetrum

In the De consolatione philosophiae we find an imprisoned Boethius lamenting the cruelty of Fortune, whom he blames for his fall from prominence and power into disgrace and despair. In the midst of his lamentations, he is visited by Lady Philosophy, who will be his physician throughout the rest of the story, meting out philosophical medicine to heal his addled soul. The key to this healing process is that she reminds Boethius of the order that embraces and governs all created phenomena in the universe, causing all events, patterns, and motions. Once Boethius remembers this universal order, he can perceive the truth of divine providence and his own place in the ordered universe.¹ In this article I want to suggest that the most powerful “order” in this healing process is the order of time, and that Chaucer recognized and amplified time’s centrality in his translation of the De consolatione, the Boece. I will also demonstrate that time’s centrality has an aesthetic correlate in Boethius’s text: its prosimetric form. Finally, I will argue that Chaucer registered the literary phenomenology of prosimetrum and revisited it in his prose and poetry.

The final book of the Boece most explicitly articulates Philosophy’s ideas about temporality, though it begins with her exploring the nature of happenstance and fortune—what Chaucer calls “hap” and “fortunous bytydynge” (V.pr.1.69, 73).² She argues that “hap is bytydynge ibrought forth by foolisshe moevynge and by no knyttynge of causes” (V.pr.1.33–34), thus foregrounding a radical incompatibility between causation and chance. From this assertion she immediately goes on to “conferme that hap nis ryght naught in no wise” (V.pr.1.35). Boece responds in confusion, asking, “‘How schal it thanne be?’ quod I. ‘Nys ther thanne nothing that by right may ben clepid other hap or elles aventure of fortune?’” (V.pr.1.56–58). Philosophy then launches into a lengthy demystification of the idea of fortune, in which she reveals that the human experience of “hap” is merely the lack of awareness of the causes that underlie all events and circumstances. Everything, she claims, “hath his propre causes, of whiche causes the cours unforseyn and unwar semeth to han makid hap” (V.pr.1.74–75). Our experience of “hap” is an artifact of our imperfect awareness of causality. If man could understand or perceive all the causes in the universe, she suggests, he would neither believe in nor experience fortune. Man cannot, however, perceive all causality. The only being who has perfect awareness of all causality is God.

This does not mean, however, that human beings are constrained to live as though bound by fortune; quite the contrary, it means that human beings must find a way to trust utterly in God’s perfect awareness of all events, in his superhuman vision. It is a tall order—to have absolute faith in what one cannot see oneself. But there is a tool that makes man’s imperfect knowledge of causation easier to bear, and shores him up against the vagaries of seemingly “fortunous” events. That tool is time. Despite the limits of human vision, man can nevertheless grasp the phantasmatic nature of fortune simply by observing time’s ordered passage. Philosophy registers this order of temporality by recourse to a grammatical metaphor: “For alle thing that lyveth in tyme, it is present and procedith fro preteritz into futures” (V.pr.6.17–19). No present time emerges ex nihilo; the present arises from the past, and the future arises from the present. This inevitable order of time thus embodies the inevitable truth of causation, the truth that nothing really “happens” in the created world without a necessitating cause coming before it in time. We cannot perceive causality, but we can perceive time, and, in that, we can find consolation.

Since human beings, as part of the created world, exist within this causal temporality, their lives, too, are governed by its order; as Philosophy goes on to say, “alle thing that lyveth in tyme” (V.pr.6.17–18) experience the succession of past into present...