The Consolations of Philosophy by Boethius, whose English translators include King Alfred, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Queen Elizabeth I, ranks among the most remarkable books to be written by a prisoner awaiting the execution of a tyrannical death sentence. Its interpretation is bound up with his other writings on mathematics and music, on Aristotelian and propositional logic, and on central themes of Christian dogma.
Chadwick begins by tracing the career of Boethius, a Roman rising to high office under the Gothic King Theoderic the Great, and suggests that his death may be seen as a cruel by-product of Byzantine ambitions to restore Roman imperial rule after its elimination in the West in AD 476. Subsequent chapters examine in detail his educational programme in the liberal arts designed to avert a threatened collapse of culture and his ambition to translate into Latin everything he could find on Plato and
Aristotle.
Boethius has been called `last of the Romans, first of the scholastics'. This book is the first major study in English of a writer who was of critical importance in the history of thought.
- ISBN10 019826447X
- ISBN13 9780198264477
- Publish Date 22 October 1981
- Publish Status Unknown
- Out of Print 17 March 2021
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Sandpiper Books
- Imprint Oxford University Press Reprints distributed by Sa
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 330
- Language English