Abstract | Keywords | Export | Availability | Bookmark

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

"Acknowledging that the Consolation of Philosophy is ‘over-familiar and under-read,’ Joel Relihan puts to the side old bromides about the work and instead pays careful attention to the narrative(s) Boethius constructs, grounding his readings in the contexts the work cultivates, especially its Menippean elements. The result is perhaps the first satisfying reading of the Consolation to be produced, a satisfaction felt also in the ways Relihan mirrors Boethius himself in the thoroughness of his scholarship and the elegance of his exposition. No one who studies Boethius will be able to ignore this book." — Joseph Pucci, Brown University "Anyone who has been fascinated, intrigued, or perhaps puzzled by the meaning, structure or argument of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy will find Joel Relihan's new book, The Prisoner's Philosophy: Life and Death in Boethius's Consolation, a welcome addition to the study of this core text of the early medieval world whose influence extends to the present time. Relihan's study is a tour de force that belongs in the library of all those who appreciate Boethius' depth and subtlety. Fortune's wheel has indeed turned in the favor of those who wish to explore with Relihan the intricacies and brilliance of the Consolation." —Fr. John Fortin, O.S.B., Saint Anselm College "The Prisoner’s Philosophy is an excellent work both of scholarship and of communication in support of a provocative thesis. Relihan and Heise present the Consolation as a new beginning for philosophy within a Christian context—a beginning only rarely appreciated since it enlists philosophy in aid of human affairs and resists the lure of an other worldly escape. Boethius not only despoiled Cynics, Satirists and Neoplatonists of their gold, but also crafted out of it a new Christian realism. Through a close reading of the text and of its reception, Relihan and Heise attend to the challenge that Boethius’ Christian vision and literary genius posed to rationalist conceptions throughout the Middle Ages." —Paul LaChance, College of Saint Elizabeth In this book, Joel C. Relihan delivers a genuinely new reading of the Consolation. He argues that it is a Christian work dramatizing not the truths of philosophy as a whole, but the limits of pagan philosophy in particular. He views it as one of a number of literary experiments of late antiquity, taking its place alongside Augustine's Confessions and Soliloquies as a spiritual meditation, as an attempt by Boethius to speak objectively about the life of the mind and its relation to God.

Boethius, --- Boethius, - -524. - De consolatione philosophiae