INTRODUCTION

'There is nothing superfluous in such a perfect work as the Consolation written by such a perfect philosopher as Boethius.' These words, written by the twelfth-century master William of Conches, express a sentiment which was almost universally shared by readers and commentators in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The popularity of the Consolation was immense, in fact almost unparalleled. It was translated into different vernacular languages from an early time onwards, which ensured an unusually wide readership, in which every stratum of society is represented: kings and queens, the nobility, monks, clerics, university teachers, school masters, and lay men and women. As a school text it was glossed by thousands of school teachers, and though it did not find a fixed and permanent place in the university curriculum, it was also frequently studied at this highest level. In this chapter we shall study some aspects of its reception, focusing on the Latin commentary tradition. It goes without saying that this can only be done in a highly selective way. There is a huge number of commentaries and glossed copies of the text, and many of them still await a first inspection. Courageous attempts are now being made to catalogue all the manuscripts, and to study and edit sets of glosses and commentaries. This has resulted in a much fuller but also much more complicated picture of the reception of the Consolation. Scholars have come to realise that the modern notion of a text written by one single author is hardly of use in charting traditions of fluent texts such as glosses and commentaries.