Tag: Boethius

Chaucer
by Sandra Alvarez September 2, 2014
Articles

Guilt and Creativity in the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer

I argue that as Chaucer develops his own expansive, questioning poetics in The House of Fame and The Canterbury Tales, he problematises the principle of allegory on which the legitimacy of literary discourse was primarily based in medieval culture and the final fragments of The Canterbury Tales see Chaucer struggling, increasingly, to reconcile the boldness and independence of his poetic vision with the demands of his faith.

by Sandra Alvarez April 10, 2012
Articles

A study in early medieval mereology: Boethius, Abelard, and pseudo-Joscelin

The twelfth-century philosopher Peter Abelard makes the bold claim that no thing
can ever gain or lose a part. This has the remarkable consequence that should, for example, the broom that is in my closet lose a hair, that very broom would no longer exist. This remarkable consequence has prompted many commentators, both medieval and contemporary, to suggest that Abelard has made a serious mistake

by Sandra Alvarez March 25, 2012
Articles

Alfred the Great’s Burnt Boethius

One can trace the reason for these curious editorial developments to two factors: (1) the inaccessibility of the tenth-century manuscript, which everyone thought was destroyed in the 1731 fire, until its burnt remains were recovered at the British Museum in the 1830s; and (2) an overpowering edition-in-progress of the twelfth-century manuscript by the great seventeenth-century scholar Francis Junius, with extensive collations from the missing tenth-century manuscript.