Project
Team
- Prof. Malcolm Godden, Rawlinson and
Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon,
Faculty of English, University of
Oxford
- Dr Rohini Jayatilaka, Faculty of
English, University of Oxford
- Dr Rosalind Love, University
Lecturer, Department of ASNC, Faculty of English,
University of Cambridge,
and Fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge
About the
Project
Boethius was one of the key figures in
the survival of classical learning and its transmission to later times. Living
at the end of the classical period, and playing an important role in the last
stages of Roman imperial civilisation in the west, he used his knowledge of
Greek and Latin and his familiarity with philosophy and poetry to write a
series of important works which were designed to make ancient learning
accessible for his own contemporaries. These became crucial texts, on
philosophy, music, arithmetic and logic, for later centuries, down to the end
of the Middle Ages and beyond. The Consolation of Philosophy, written in exile
around 525, possibly in prison and under sentence of death at the end of his
life after a rupture with the Gothic king of Italy, is the most famous and
influential of these texts. Written in dialogue form and interweaving prose and
poetry, it was translated into English in Anglo-Saxon times, reputedly by King
Alfred, and later by Chaucer and Queen Elizabeth I among others, and into Old
High German, French and other languages; it was a key source for literary
authors in many medieval languages; and it became an important educational
text, used to instruct successive generations of students and scholars in the
art of poetry and rhetoric, and in astronomy, natural history, classical legend
and history, and the Latin language.
The key period for this explosion of
interest and influence is the three centuries from the discovery of the work in
790 by Alcuin, an Anglo-Saxon scholar belonging to the circle of Charlemagne,
to the end of the eleventh century. Though the outlines of this explosion are
known the main evidence is still buried in thousands of annotations and glosses
written in the margins and between the lines of scores of manuscripts of the
Consolation. These convey contemporary explanations (and misunderstandings) of
a vast range of allusions in the text, from Sirens to Socrates and actresses to
astronomy.
Scholars have known of the existence
of these glosses or scholia for over a century, and several have at various
times set out to collect the material and make it available to others in
accessible form, but all have failed or abandoned the task on discovering the
scale of the challenge and the difficulty of organising the masses of material.
As a result, many people refer to this material in general terms, and some cite
comments from individual manuscripts, but no-one knows what is really there.
The long-established notion that what the manuscripts contain are essentially
lots of different copies of just two commentaries, one by Remigius of Auxerre
and another by someone known only as 'The Anonymous of St Gall', is clearly
wrong. We are probably looking at the contributions of many unknown
commentators working in France, Germany, England, Wales and Ireland, over the
ninth to eleventh centuries. What we aim to do is build a picture of this range
of knowledge and understanding and interests at a time of rapid cultural
change.
Malcolm Godden and Rohini Jayatilaka
have been working on this material since 2002, as part of their Alfredian
Boethius project. For the present project, they and Rosalind Love aim to
develop this work and make the material fully accessible to everyone interested
in it. Our aim is to decipher and transcribe all those annotations and glosses,
to edit and translate them, and then to analyse what they tell us about the
understanding of classical culture, natural history, astronomy etc. in the
period, and to trace the ways in which this kind of material, and Boethius's
own ideas, percolated into other kinds of literature and into the general
understanding of the past and of the physical world in the period.
Our primary target is a full edited
compilation of the whole corpus, recording or collating all distinct glosses
and variations amongst them, apart from mere differences of spelling and
word-order. This will run to about 2,000 pages, and will, we hope, be
eventually available in both print and fully-searchable electronic form. To
make the material more accessible, we aim also to produce a select edition
based on English MSS of the tenth and eleventh century, which will give a good
representative picture of the glosses that were current in both England and the
Continent in the period. This will be published in book form.
In support of this material we will
provide descriptions of the MSS, an analysis of the history of the commentary
material and a detailed commentary examining the sources of the glosses and
assessing the information that they provide.
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Advisory
Group
We have assembled a group of advisers
expert in the relevant fields of medieval texts, history, science, language and
glossing. Each year we will hold a workshop with them and others to discuss
work in progress, the work of parallel projects and issues related to the
commentary.
The advisory group are:
- Dr Mary Garrison, Dept of History,
University of York
- Prof. Susan Irvine, Dept of English,
University College London
- Prof. Stephen McCluskey, Dept. of
History, University of West Virginia
- Prof. Rosamond McKitterick, History
Faculty, Cambridge University
- Prof. Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe,
Dept of English, University of California, Berkeley
- Dr Sinead O'Sullivan, Dept of
History, Queen's University Belfast
- Prof. Marina Passalacqua,
Dipartimento di Filologia Greca e Latina, Università Roma 'La Sapienza'
- Prof. Paul E. Szarmach, Director,
Medieval Academy of America
- Dr Mariken Teeuwen of the Martianus
Capella project at the Huygens Institute, The Hague
- Dr Paolo Vaciago, Istituzioni di
Filologia Germanica, Università Roma Tre
- Prof. Joseph Wittig, English
Department, University of North Carolina
- Prof. Roger Wright, Hispanic
Studies, Liverpool University
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Related
Projects
The Martianus Capella Project
Project
Workshops
For details of Workshop I
click here.
Contacts
The Boethius Commentary Project,
English Faculty, University of Oxford, St Cross Building, Manor Road, Oxford
OX1 3UQ
- Professor Malcolm R. Godden:
malcolm.godden@ell.ox.ac.uk
- Dr Rohini Jayatilaka:
boethius@ell.ox.ac.uk
- Dr Rosalind Love:
rcl10@hermes.cam.ac.uk
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