Sacred Texts: Legends and Sagas

The Canterbury Tales and Other Works of Chaucer (Middle E...

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This is Book 1 of *Boece*, Chaucer's 14th-century Middle English prose translation of Boethius's *Consolatio Philosophiae* (c. 524 AD), a foundational work of late antique and medieval philosophy written by the Roman statesman while awaiting execution. The narrator, imprisoned and fallen from worldly prosperity, laments his misfortune in verse while the Muses of poetry attend him — until a towering, luminous woman appears and expels them, dismissing them as "common strumpets" who feed grief with "sweet venom" rather than healing it. This woman reveals herself as Lady Philosophy, the narrator's lifelong teacher, who diagnoses his despair as a form of amnesia — a "lethargy" caused by forgetting his true self — and begins to restore his sight by wiping his tear-clouded eyes. Philosophy then defends her longstanding enmity with wicked and foolish men, cataloguing a tradition of persecuted philosophers (Socrates, Anaxagoras, Seneca, Zeno) to argue that suffering for wisdom's sake is no novelty and no disgrace. The passage's most distinctive claim is its hierarchy of remedies: poetic lamentation is actively harmful, while philosophical reasoning — represented by the Greek letters on Philosophy's garment marking the active and contemplative lives — is the only true medicine for a soul undone by Fortune.

The Canterbury Tales and Other Works of Chaucer (Middle E...

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