Putting Boethius into Chaucer's Boece: The Ethics of Authorship in the Boke of Coumfort

Abstract

Abstract Despite the importance of Boethius's biography to centuries of readers, Chaucer's Boece is silent about the author's life and lacks the prefatory material that frequently circulated with the Latin Consolatio. This article shows how an anonymous fifteenth-century translation, the Boke of Coumfort in Bodleian Library, Oxford MS Auct. F.3.5, reinserts Boethius as auctor and teacher of ethics back into the Boece. In so doing, the anonymous reader-translator mingles the Latin and vernacular traditions to cast Boethius's historical and textual lives as an integrated ethical model for readers to emulate. By identifying the translator's sources and showing how he deploys them to emend and “improve” Chaucer's translation, we may see more clearly the assumptions and reading strategies that a late medieval translator or reader might expect to be specified in the Boece.