Pembroke College : De consolatione philosophiae (Middle English translation)

Boethius

Pembroke College

At some point in the 1380s, Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340—1400), better known now as a poet, translated into English prose a work of late classical Latin, De Consolatione Philosophiae ('On the consolation of Philosophy') by Boethius (c. 480—c.524). This Latin work influenced Chaucer's poems, notably his Troilus and Criseyde, and Chaucer's translation, known as Boece, was used by many English readers and writers for over a century.Cambridge’s libraries hold three manuscript copies of Chaucer's translation. For instance, in <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-II-00003-00021/1'>Cambridge, University Library, MS Ii.3.21</a>, Boethius's Latin alternates with Chaucer's English, written in a different size of script on pages ruled to allow that. The scribe supplies learned Latin glosses by Nicholas Trevet and William of Aragon between the lines and in the margins, which are wide enough to invite readers to comment further. Two of Chaucer's delightful short lyrics based on Boethius’s work are included too.By contrast, the copy digitised here, preserved at Pembroke College, is less monumental and less complex in its apparatus for readers. The materials are plain, with some leaves recycled after being ruled for a different project (e.g. the unused ruling at the foot of ff. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(63);return false;'>26r</a>, <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(68);return false;'>28v</a>). Chaucer's English prose forms a simple and small block on each page. Only the first few words of the Latin, between one and four lines, appear before each section in English, as a cue to where one might find the original in another book. Simple blue initials with red tracery mark each English section or Latin excerpt. The margins are narrow. At an unknown moment in time, the manuscript has lost its final third, after f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(158);return false;'>73v</a> (in book IV, prose 5).This copy, though, prompted some keen reading and new writing. In the margins, a later reader added eight notes in a small, jerky handwriting and rudimentary Latin, and this awkward handwriting is recognisable as that of one William Worcester (1415—1483/85). Worcester was secretary to the war veteran and landowner Sir John Fastolf (1380—1459), but alongside that he was a keen scholar and an author, producing a translation of Cicero's De senectute ('Of Old Age') and a political treatise of his own, The Boke of Noblesse. We can identify Worcester's handwriting because there survive twenty-three autograph letters by him, forty-one by others to whom Worcester was amanuensis, twenty-four manuscripts annotated by him and seven miscellanies he annotated and compiled, among them this copy of Boece here digitised (and Cambridge, University Library, MS Add. 7870).It is often possible to link Worcester's annotations with his notebooks and new writing, and that is also true of his notes on Chaucer’s Boece. First, there is Worcester’s Latin notebook, now <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://parker.stanford.edu/parker/catalog/mp810zm2076'>Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 210</a>, which he kept between 1478 and 1480. In it, he transcribed some passages of Boethius's original Latin (book IV, metre 3 and prose 3), and he seems to have read the original with the help of Chaucer's translation, just as one might use a parallel text, for he highlights those passages on ff. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(143);return false;'>66r-66v</a> in the manuscript of Boece here digitised (Compare p. 391 of John Harvey’s printed edition of his notebook, called his Itineraries.)Then, Worcester's reading fed directly into his political treatise The Boke of Noblesse. In that, he borrowed a description of classical heroes whose valour should inspire us (book IV, metre 7). Vexingly, his copy of Boece has lost this passage in the work's final third (as said), so we cannot know whether he annotated them in this manuscript. But the wording in The Boke of Noblesse is notably close to that of Chaucer in Boece (for instance, borrowing a description of how Hercules 'byrafte' the lion of his skin). We might think of it less as plagiarism than as a creative writer's prerogative to reuse and remix what he read, a typical element of fifteenth-century literature which was often grounded in such compilation.Finally, beyond vivid examples, Worcester's reading of Boece dovetailed in less direct ways with the underpinning ideas of The Boke of Noblesse. In the manuscript here digitised, Worcester added four marginalia to a passage of book I, prose 4, about Boethius's service of the common good or what Chaucer calls the 'commune profite' (ff. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(23);return false;'>6r</a>, <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(25);return false;'>7r</a> [twice], <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(27);return false;'>8r</a>), a translation of Latin res publica (the origin of the word 'republic'). Serving the common good is one of the main topics of The Boke of Noblesse, and Worcester gathered exhortations to serve the common good from many works he read. But in The Boke he shifts from the term 'comyn wele' to Chaucer's term 'comyn profit' from Boece (as Worcester spells it) just after citing as one model for public service 'Boecius' and his 'grete lofe had alway to the cite of Rome' ('his great love always had for the city of Rome').This humble copy of Boece, then, exemplifies the growing willingness of English readers in the 1400s, after Chaucer's example, to read classical literature and learned works of all kinds in translation. It exemplifies their growing interest in the common good or res publica - what Chaucer is the first in English, in Boece, to dub as the 'commune profite'. And it exemplifies the way that readers of the 1400s and following centuries did what Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine once called 'studying for action', reading with pen in hand, making notes that would provoke new writing or indeed political activity of their own. Any book, however plain, can be revolutionary for readers in this way. (I thank Dr Catherine Nall for allowing me to draw on forthcoming edition of The Boke of Noblesse.)Daniel Wakelin Jeremy Griffiths Professor of Medieval English Palaeography Faculty of English, University of Oxford