The Translation and Reception of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy in Renaissance Literary Culture, 1556-1674

Abstract

In this study, I offer the first comprehensive treatment of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy (524 AD) in its early modern English translations. I situate the translations produced between 1556 and 1674 against trends in the European book trade, continental scholarship, and the Boethian commentary tradition, as well as vital English trends in poetics, epistolary culture, and private and institutional life. I make two primary arguments concerning these translations. First, I argue that the uniquely varied thematic and formal interests of the original — fortune, posterity, displacement and exile; dialogue, prosimetrum, so-called ars versificandi — enable an equally unique set of new identities in reception, as translators remake the text in accordance with their own particular interests or those of their dedicatees. Second, I argue that the most radical of these transformations occurs in the least visible settings: while the major printed translations themselves manifest substantive changes in form and character from the original, those produced in private manuscripts, dedicated to specific individuals, or shared in epistolary form go much further. In making these arguments, I engage with critical and historical trends which have revitalised translation studies in recent times: translation and the book trade, translation and continental scholarship, and, in particular, the move towards hitherto understudied source authors and lesser-known later translators. In chapter 1, I examine the two major printed translations in the period, by George Colvile (1556) and I. T. (1609). I argue that, while both translators claim neutral fidelity to their original, both in fact balance their works between this interpretive openness, and directiveness to one favoured reading. While both demonstrate anxieties about historical difference, I argue that Colvile responds with stylistic plainness and heavy recourse to an unacknowledged Medieval commentary, whereas I. T. does so with a modern prose style and a full complement of turn-of-the-century verse forms. In chapter 2, I discuss two manuscript translations each notable for the insistence with which their translators remake the Consolation to suit specific recipients. John Bracegirdle, in Psychopharmacon (c. 1604), introduces substantive innovations drawn from contemporary discourses in logic, moral philosophy, and poetics which were of interest to his dedicatee, Thomas Sackville. T. R., in their version dedicated to Margaret Clifford (1584), dresses the text with innumerable scriptural references and polemical annotations which seek to turn it into a work of devout theology, but which ultimately advertise the text’s resistance to such transformations. In chapter 3, I argue that heavily-revised manuscript translations by Richard Fanshawe (c. 1636), John Polwhele (1649), and Sir John Hobart and Nicholas Bacon (1664-5) demonstrate the vitality of solely poetic translations in the 17th century, and suggest that these reveal both political interests and also broader, hitherto-unrecognised concerns with poetic experimentation and personal consolation. In a final coda, I discuss the numerous Boethian passages excerpted in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621-1651) and Owen Felltham’s Resolves (1628-1709). I argue that these decontextualised fragments repurpose many of the text’s fundamental arguments, yet also manifest many of the same anxieties which characterise translators’ more sustained interactions with the text elsewhere. In so doing, they reaffirm the text’s early modern character as one defined by its remakings.