Henry Chadwick
Oxford University Press (Clarendon Press), 1998 (reprint of 1981 edition).
cloth, dj., 330 pp. ISBN: 019826447x. Fine.
Book Number 19830
Boethius (c.AD 470-524), a Roman senator who rose to high office under the Gothic king Theoderic the Great, has been called the "last of the Romans, first of the scholastics". His Consolation of Philosophy, whose English translators include King Alfred, Chaucer, and Elizabeth I, ranks among the most remarkable books to be written by a prisoner awaiting execution. Its interpretation is bound up with Boethius' other writings on mathematics and music, on Aristotelian and propositional logic, and on central themes of Christian dogma. This book was the first major study to concentrate on Boethius himself and investigate his debt to the Platonists of Athens and Alexandria and to Augustine, rather than his influence on later writers. In the words of Chadwick, its purpose is 'to see the man in the setting of his own turbulent and tormented age, not to trace his large posterity in thought and literature.'