highlyeccentric | OK. King Alfred('s translator). Boethius. We can do this. (Reply)

As I mentioned yesterday, I was planning to do something on visions and cosmology. And then I discovered the Alfredian Boethius and the complicated world of Boethian studies and decided that looked like more fun. However, tomorrow, I have to give David an essay proposal. With any luck, this entry will turn into an essay proposal.

What is it?- Background for non-Anglo-Saxonists

So, in the ninth century sometime, Alfred comes to the throne in Wessex. He's got a whole pile of Vikings on the one hand and the disunited remnants of the english kingdoms on the other. The big monasteries have had to be evacuated, thanks to the vikings, and according to Alfred, few or no monks remained who could read Latin. That's probably a bit of royal hyperbole, but point is, he was concerned about the state of learning in England and he was concerned about its political state.
The two go together- he reasoned that the pagan invasions were punishment for lax religiousity on the part of the english; therefore, by improving the education of the people he could improve their moral state. Meanwhile, the disunity of the remaining kingdoms was a problem, and it's in this period that we start to get a sense of "Englishness" in the literature of the period. Alfred's education program took the form of a massive translation project, with morally improving works being translated, with varying exactitued, from the Latin to the (Old) English. If Latin literacy wasn't up to scratch, that's a practical choice, but it's also a political one- promotion of a national language and national system of scripts is part of the creation of a national spirit.
Alfred used to be considered the author of these translations- as the OE proclaims him. It has, relatively recently, been concluded that he didn't write them at all. (I believe by M.R. Godden, whom I am yet to read)
The translations included Gregory the Great's Pastoral Care, St Augustine's Soliloquies, and (in case you haven't guessed), Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy.

The Anglo-Saxon Consolation: Why It's Interesting

The AS Consolation in fact doesn't look much like the original. It cuts out sizeable sections, and yet is nearly twice as long. It is a distinctly Anglo-Saxon work, no one's arguing that. As Dan rather ineloquently put it "the Boethius is the key." The question is how, and in what way, is it uniquely Anglo-Saxon, and does it or does it not present a Boethian world-view in Anglo-Saxon terms?
*It is much more heavily/ explicitly Christianised. Boethius was a Christian but the Latin isn't an explicitly Christian work. The Anglo-Saxon version is very clear about its Christianity- it doesn't simply contrast Eternity with man's mortality, it contrasts God's eternity with man's mortality, and so on.
*The Anglo-Saxon version is directed toward political leadership. Bolton argues that this tack is influenced by Alcuin's commentaries on Boethius for Charlemagne.
* the AS Boethius turned up when I was researching the mind in AS literature. Godden, in Anglo-Saxons in the Mind, talks about Alfred's explanation of the three-fold soul, to which Boethius refers in passing, as a three-fold human soul (which is not clear in the Latin text but probably comes from Alcuin, again). Godden also finds in Alfred a much closer relationship between mind and soul than is found in Boethius' original.
* its presentation of wyrd (fate, which fills in where Fortune is in the Latin version). There have been all kinds of back-and-forth arguments about this- is wyrd set against man? what is the principle of order in the Alfredian version? does it or does it not work with the Boethian? I haven't got my head around this yet.

Looking back over this, I really have no idea what I'm talking about. Which is probably a good place to write a question from. What do I want to find out? How do I want all of this to synthesise?

Ok. Question:
Does the Old English "Consolation of Philosophy" present a uniquely Anglo-Saxon cosmology? How does this relate to the cosmology of the Boethian original?

Expect another entry before I sort myself out to write the essay. I've decided that if I can't explain to niamh_sage what I'm researching and why it's interesting, then I stand no chance of convincing Microsoft Word of its value. Microsoft Word really is the most unsympathetic audience I've ever had, and I swear it's getting more and more hostile as time goes on.