Drawing a connection between a fire (at Fleury in 974), a letter (from Lantfred of Fleury to Dunstan of Canterbury), a poem (Carmen de libero arbitrio), and a manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS lat. 6401), this essay reconstructs two potential trajectories of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, as it crossed and re-crossed the Channel between Winchester, Fleury, and Ramsey in the decades on either side of the year 1000. The study of the early medieval English reception of Boethius’s Consolation usually centers on its translation into Old English at the beginning of the tenth century. By turning instead to the end of the century and to the beginning of the next, this essay demonstrates the resiliency of Boethius’s dialectical original—and claims another, more diffuse Boethian tradition for early medieval England. In short, Boethius’s Consolation may have arrived in England from the Continent ca. 900, but it did not stop moving—its travels demonstrating not only the interconnectivity of late tenth-century monastic centers in England and on the Continent but also the enduring importance of Boethius’s Latin text in the century after it was first translated into English, highlighting figures such as Lantfred and Abbo of Fleury, Æthelwold of Winchester, and Byrhtferth of Ramsey.

AbstractCritics have long wondered about the setting and intent of the Old English translation of Boethius's De consolatione philosophiae, first into prose and then into prosimetrum. This article situates the dual translation within the broader context of ninth- and tenth-century literary culture, challenging the received view of the two versions as separate projects and arguing instead that the Old English Boethius was conceived and received as a vernacular opus geminatum, or ‘twinned work’. While the opus geminatum and the prosimetrum are generally thought to maintain distinct generic identities, this case study allows for a more capacious understanding of both modes, which I demonstrate were inescapably linked in Anglo-Saxon circles – and which were shaped by a broader aesthetic of prose-verse mixture.

The central regulatory document of the tenth-century English Benedictine Reform, Æthelwold of Winchester’s Regularis concordia, contains an important performance piece: the Visitatio sepulchri, which standard theater histories understand as an anomalous originary text that marks the reemergence of drama in the European Middle Ages. This article resituates it alongside the schoolroom colloquies of Æthelwold’s student Ælfric of Eynsham and his student and editor Ælfric Bata to argue that these texts together cultivated monastic self-possession by means of self-conscious performances of its absence. By staging (in)attention, they thereby modeled extended engagement in moments and spaces that could otherwise seem too quiet or empty to hold concentration for long, from the classroom to the sepulcher to the page, while also exposing the limits of “distraction” and “attention” as analytical terms.

This chapter provides a holistic overview of the reception of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy in medieval England, from the Old English Boethius to George Ashby’s A Prisoner’s Reflections, as well as chapter summaries for the essays in The Legacy of Boethius in Medieval England: The Consolation and its Afterlives.

What would it mean to ‘date’ Beowulf? And what do we learn when we try? This playful pun on one of the more controversial terms in the scholarship on this poem allows a consideration of the range of intimacies generated by it as well as a conditioning of both the poem and its scholarship. Accordingly, this introductory chapter seeks to get intimate with Beowulf, drawing on critical discussions of affect, queer historiography, and contemporary literary theory in order to form a kind of dating profile that serves as a conceptual framework for the various modes of intimacy in and with the poem that emerge throughout the volume. Dating Beowulf coheres as a project in presenting a new set of readings – both critical and personal – that aim to generate new avenues of discussion for an Old English poem too often mired in critical impasses, and this opening essay frames the conversation accordingly, highlighting the various couplings and methodological approaches on display, while articulating the relevance of the early Middle Ages to affect studies and vice versa.

To this end, the essays embody a range of critical approaches from queer theory to animal studies and ecocriticism to actor-network theory.