Impersonating Boethius in Middle English literature.

摘要

This dissertation focuses on the literary persona of Boethius, a classical sage turned Christian martyr, and its influence on later writers. In particular, it investigates how later authors went beyond literary imitation to impersonate Boethius himself, fashioning themselves as later-day avatars of Boethius and reincarnating the details of his life in their own accounts of themselves. Unlike modern sanitized approaches to persona, the medieval textual transmission of Boethian material emphasized connections between the historical person and literary representation. The Consolation of Philosophy particularly encouraged such authorial discrimination, responsibility, and development of medieval literary theory due to its first-person narrator, dialogic nature, and apparent autobiography. Chapter 1 traces the literary history of Boethius's first person narrator through hagiography, the vita tradition, and the interpretive framework accumulated across centuries of marginal notes, and illustrations. Vernacular translations, such as the Alfredian Old English Boethius, provide an on-site glimpse into early medieval applications of Boethius's persona to new circumstances. Medieval commentaries, on the other hand, were interested in mapping points upon which author spoke in propria persona, or in his own person. The Remigian gloss, and its successors, the commentaries of William of Conches and Nicholas Trevet receive particular attention.;By the fourteenth century, vernacular translations and looser, more literary imitations also abounded. Chapter 2 examines London scrivener Thomas Usk and his Testament of Love, his aspiring impersonators. A condemned conspirator who becomes a traitor twice over by serving as king's evidence, Usk's self-preoccupation and worldly ambitions apparently belie the Testament's Boethian form, and infuse it with the more ambivalent allusions of Troilus and Criseyde. Chapter 3 traces Usk's efforts to move outside of self-fashioning to objective persuasion. By deploying the tradition of topical logic, long transmitted by Boethius's De topicis differentiis, Usk tries to show himself to be not only like the Boethian prisoner, but also a philosophical magister with a claim to truthfulness. Thomas Usk's textual strategies reveal the proximity of the whole Boethian corpus to the Consolation of Philosophy, as vitae and university texts transform the Testament of Love into more than a consolation---a disputation to restore Usk's lost credibility before a hostile audience. Chapter 4 turns to Thomas Hoccleve's Prologue to the Regiment of Princes, where Hoccleve "vulgarizes" and ventriloquizes Boethius by overlapping the Consolatio tradition with the Chaucerian corpus. Piling up double and triple allusions, Hoccleve transforms Boethian recollection to memorialize an authority closer to his own life---Geoffrey Chaucer---not only through the famous eulogies and portrait, but through the figure of the "Old Man.";Through all of these means, vernacular writings like the Prologue to the Regiment of Princes and the Testament of Love maximize the dramatic overtones of the Consolatio tradition, and its potential for narrative, agency, and self-transformation. Far from a monolithic and static entity, medieval understandings of "Boethianism" range across a spectrum of attitudes and interpretations. The focal point of each, however, is the person of Boethius. Examining the connections made between the man and the texts he produced, and how far one illuminates the other, facilitates understanding of who Boethius in propria persona was in the Middle Ages; as well as for whom, and to what uses Boethius may be put.