This collection of essays explores consolation and mourning in the varied, sometimes provocative, readings of Boethius and of Stoic consolation by French, English, Italian and German authors, including Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machaut, Chaucer, Wyatt and Queen Elizabeth I.

This collection of essays explores consolation and mourning in the varied, sometimes provocative, readings of Boethius and of Stoic consolation by French, English, Italian and German authors, including Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machaut, Chaucer, Wyatt and Queen Elizabeth I.

At once a royal secretary, a poet, and a composer, Guillaume de Machaut was one of the most protean and creative figures of the late Middle Ages. Rather than focus on a single strand of his remarkable career, Elizabeth Eva Leach gives us a book that encompasses all aspects of his work, illuminating it in a distinctively interdisciplinary light. The author provides a comprehensive picture of Machaut's artistry, reviews the documentary evidence about his life, charts the different agendas pursued by modern scholarly disciplines in their rediscovery and use of specific parts of his output, and delineates Machaut's own poetic and material presentation of his authorial persona. Leach treats Machaut's central poetic themes of hope, fortune, and death, integrating the aspect of Machaut's multimedia art that differentiates him from his contemporaries' treatment of similar thematic issues: music. In restoring the centrality of music in Machaut's poetics, arguing that his words cannot be truly understood or appreciated without the additional layers of meaning created in their musicalization, Leach makes a compelling argument that musico-literary performance occupied a special place in the courts of fourteenth-century France.

Richard is a lawyer who just lost his case in front of the court. Feeling frustrated, he purchases some liquor and takes it back to his hotel room where he stayed for the duration of the trial, in hopes of drowning his sorrows. A phone call from a friend gives him an alternative way to spend the evening. As more and more alcohol pours down his throat, he dials the number of a call girl agency and soon a stunningly beautiful woman shares his bed. He had no intention of bedding her, but he realizes with her he can act out his every fantasy. He orders her around to please him and she does that very well, but by dawn she has to leave. He returns home to his wife, remorseful, but does not confess. When he sees her, he realizes how beautiful she is. He can't tell her. Instead, he makes love to her, desperately trying to clean his conscience.

This collection provides a comprehensive reading of Machaut’s literary and musical corpus that privileges his engagement with contemporary political, ethical, and aesthetic concerns of late medieval culture as well as his reception by artists and thinkers, medieval and modern.

This collection challenges conventional ideas of beauty by exploring unconventional approaches to the topic in the arts, sciences and mathematics.