Chaucer's translation of Boethius's "De consolatione philosphiæ" / edited from British Museum additional MS. 10, 340 collated with Cambridge University Library MS. Ii.3.21 by Richard Morris

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Title

Author

Boethius, d. 524

Editor

Morris, Richard, 1833-1894

Publication

London: Oxford University Press

1868

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"Chaucer's translation of Boethius's "De consolatione philosphiæ" / edited from British Museum additional MS. 10, 340 collated with Cambridge University Library MS. Ii.3.21 by Richard Morris." In the digital collection Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse. https://name.umdl.umich.edu/ChaucerBo. University of Michigan Library Digital Collections. Accessed April 27, 2025.

Pages

XIII. FORTUNE.

------FortuneThat semeth trewest when she wol bigyle,. . . . . . . . . . . . .And, when a wight is from hire whiel ithrowe,Than laugheth she, and maketh hym the mowe.

(Troylus and Cryseyde, bk. iii. st. 254, vol. iv. p. 299.)

She (Fortune) vseþ ful flatryng familarité wiþ hem þat she enforceþ to bygyle.

—(Chaucer's Boethius, p. 30.)

. . . . . . . She lauȝeþ and scorneþ þe wepyng of hem þe whiche she haþ maked wepe wiþ hir free wille. . . . . Yif þat a wyȝt is seyn weleful and ouerþrowe in an houre.

—(Ib. p. 33.)

In book v., stanza 260, vol. v. p. 75, Chaucer describes how the soul of Hector, after his death, ascended 'up to the holughnesse of the seventhe spere.' In so doing he seems to have had before him met. 1, book 4, of Boethius, where the 'soul' is described as passing into the heaven's utmost sphere, and looking down on the world below. See Chaucer's Boethius, p. 110, 111.

Ætas Prima is of course a metrical version of lib. ii. met. 5.

Hampole speaks of the wonderful sight of the Lynx; perhaps he was indebted to Boethius for the hint.—(See Boethius, book 3, pr. 8, p. 81.)

I have seen the following elsewhere:

(1) Value not beauty, for it may be destroyed by a three days' fever.

(See Chaucer's Boethius, p. 81.)

(2) There is no greater plague than the enmity of thy familiar friend.

(See Chaucer's translation, p. 77.)