Chaucer's translation of Boethius' work is related to medieval intellectual culture, with attention to Trevet's Boethius commentary. This collection seeks to locate the Boece within the medievaltradition of the academic study and translation of the Consolatiophilosophiae, thereby relating the work to the intellectual culturewhich made it possible.It begins with the fullest study yet undertakenof the Boethius commentary of Nicholas Trevet, this being a majorsource of the Boece. There follow editions and translationsof the major passages in Trevet's commentary whereNeoplatonic issuesare confronted, then Chaucer's debt to Trevet is assessed in a detailedreview. The many choices which faced Chaucer as a translator are indicated and the Boeceis placed in a long line of interpreters of Boethius in which both Latin commentators and vernacular translators played their parts. Finally, a view is offered of the Boece as anexample of late-medieval `academic translation': if the Boeceis assigned to this genre, it may be judged a considerable success.

This edition offers you the first Modern English version of Chaucer’s only previously untranslated major work, Boece. Boece is Chaucer’s Middle English translation of the 6th-century CE philosopher Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy. For over a thousand years, The Consolation underpinned Christian understanding of Fate, Fortune, Free Will, and Divine Providence, and its ideas influenced Chaucer’s major works. While many editions offer a Modern English translation from the original Latin, this edition gives you an approachable version of Chaucer’s translation and puts you face-to-face with his phrasings and emendations. Here, the father of English poetry’s voice finally speaks up, so you can enjoy his poetic turns and even track where the language from Boece echoes in The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde.

The three medieval texts that make up Jankyn's Book of Wikked Wyves have formed a vital part of Chaucerian research for more than half a century. Integrated here for the first time, these texts now form a cornerstone volume of the Chaucer Library series. Near the end of her prologue, Chaucer's Wife of Bath tells how her fifth husband, Jankyn, a clerk of Oxford, taunted her by reading from a collection of antifeminist tracts. The contents of Jankyn's book include three texts that enjoyed wide distribution in the later Middle Ages: Walter Map's "Dissuasio Valerii," Theophrastus's "De Nuptiis," and Jerome's "Adversus Jovinianum." The first two are reproduced in their entirety in this volume, with selections from the third. The editors examine Jankyn's book from many angles, including the extensive manuscript sources from which it may be reconstructed, background information for its literary appreciation, and Chaucer's use of the materials. The publication of this volume, the fourth in the Chaucer Library, represents a major event for medievalists.

Literary scholars often avoid the category of the aesthetic in discussions of ethics, believing that purely aesthetic judgments can vitiate analyses of a literary work’s sociopolitical heft and meaning. In Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages, Eleanor Johnson reveals that aesthetics—the formal aspects of literary language that make it sense-perceptible—are indeed inextricable from ethics in the writing of medieval literature. Johnson brings a keen formalist eye to bear on the prosimetric form: the mixing of prose with lyrical poetry. This form descends from the writings of the sixth-century Christian philosopher Boethius—specifically his famous prison text, Consolation of Philosophy—to the late medieval English tradition. Johnson argues that Boethius’s text had a broad influence not simply on the thematic and philosophical content of subsequent literary writing, but also on the specific aesthetic construction of several vernacular traditions. She demonstrates the underlying prosimetric structures in a variety of Middle English texts—including Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and portions of the Canterbury Tales, Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love, John Gower’s Confessio amantis, and Thomas Hoccleve’s autobiographical poetry—and asks how particular formal choices work, how they resonate with medieval literary-theoretical ideas, and how particular poems and prose works mediate the tricky business of modeling ethical transformation for a readership.