Introduction: The Corpus of Boethius's Writings

Like Aristotle before him, Boethius approached acquiring and recording knowledge systematically, but less comprehensively than his more famous antecedent. Unlike Aristotle, Boethius was more scholar than scientist, as his interests focused on certain well-defined areas of the humanities to the exclusion of the biological sciences. His extant works fall generally into four subject-areas of inquiry: (1) logic, (2) mathematics, (3) theology, and (4) the uniquely comprehensive final work entitled De Consolatione Philosophiae. Boethius's books in these areas established the basic curriculum of medieval education, with its “lower-division courses” of the trivium and its “upper-division courses” of the quadrivium, and they laid the groundwork for scholasticism, which came to define the methodology of teaching and research in the later Middle Ages. Translations of the Consolatio appeared in abundance in the late medieval era; within the work, Lady Philosophy affirms a rational order for the universe, with which Boethius the Prisoner concurs. The production of translations represents one significant aspect of the general attempt to find “real order” underlying the “apparent chaos” of events occurring during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in particular, including the political and military confrontations of the Hundred Years' War, social and demographic devastation brought about by the bubonic plague, the rise of nation states and national monarchies, and other changes for which the certainty of universal order would have provided a form of assurance or consolation. One facet of the popularity of the Consolation translations is this affirmation of a universe ruled by a rational deity.