The Politics of Chaucer's Boece
By focusing on the historicity and politics of translation, I discuss in this paper the political motive and functions of The Boece, Chaucer's translation from Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophiae. After examining the political implications of Boethius's work, I argue that the Latin source provides an insight into the nature of royal power, especially its perversion into tyranny. From the investigation of the history and politics in the early 1380s when the young Richard began to establish his sovereignty firmly, I suggest an educational motive of Chaucer's Boece for the king: the translation might have been aimed at giving the young king lessons about what constitutes a tyrant, thus warning him of the vices and dangers of aggregating excessive governing power. I also suggest that, during the period from the mid-1380s to 1399 when the king became more and more tyrannical, The Boece may have had potential resonance with the concerns of the king's opponents, his magnates, about the misuse of royal power. I conclude with the observation that, contrary to Chaucer's expectations of diverting the king from the dangerous road of excessive power, his Boece could have served as one of the tools of attack for the magnates to confront, and eventually depose, Richard Ⅱ.
Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381
Justice includes a very brief discussion of Gower's allegorical vision of the Peasants' Revolt in Book 1 of VC in this subtle and often fascinating study of the ways in which the rebellion was represented in the writings both of its participants and of those who either were or sympathized with its victims. Gower, of course, figures among the latter. Having appropriated for himself the voice of the "people" in composing what are now Books 2-7 of VC, Gower faced a popular uprising that both undermined his claim and threatened to absorb him. In order to protect both his project as poet and his carefully constructed political stance, he added the visio in Book 1, which is most notable for its submersion of the voice of the rebels in the braying and bellowing of the animals into which Gower imagines them transformed. "The rising forced Gower anxiously to disassociate his 'voice crying out' from the voices that cried out in June; by declaring himself a proxy for all those the rebels attacked and by prefacing the rest of the poem with his experience of rebel violence, he was able to assert that he did indeed speak in the common voice — of its victims" (p. 213). Justice interprets Chaucer's only reference to the rising as an even more artful evasion. Elaborating on a suggestion first made by Ian Bishop, he reads the chase scene in NPT as a direct parody of the visio in VC, accessible, however, only to the small group of readers in the poets' immediate circle who would recognize the subtlest taunting at Gower's expense. Chaucer's only direct engagement with the revolt thus shows him "dispelling and forgetting its threat in the minutely textual encoding of a coterie joke" (pp. 230-31). PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 16.1]
Boethius against Universals: The Arguments in the Second Commentary on Porphyry
1 In that passage, he first reviews the arguments for and against the existence of universal entities, and then offers a theory he attributes to Alexander of Aphrodisias, a kind of theory called in recent times "moderate realism," according to which there are no universal en tities in the ontol ogy of the world, but nevertheless there is an objective, non-arbitrary basis for the forma- tion of our universal or general concepts about that world. At the very end of the passage, Boethius adds the intriguing comment that he has presented this view not necessarily because it is his own, but because it is the one that fits Aristotle's