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Examining Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy both within its original late classical context and through the medieval commentary tradition, chapter 4 argues that Lady Philosophy inherits her basic mode of being from classical daemons, and thus is neither transcendent nor fully authoritative. Philosophy’s intermediate status is encoded in her femininity, which allows her to nurse the young and care for the sick but limits her influence over full-fledged philosophers. Neither in the Consolation itself nor in the medieval commentaries does Philosophy lead the way to transcendence. In Boethius’ prosimetrum, the prisoner finally seeks God through humble prayer rather than Neoplatonic ascent, redefining philosophy as a fundamentally worldly discipline concerned with moral probity and political justice. Medieval commentators likewise cordon off the highest reaches of philosophy as ill-suited for personification, leaving Philosophy as the mistress of a diminished and downward-looking discipline, suitable for beginners and those who look away from the heights to devote themselves to the public good. Understood in these terms, Philosophy embodies a specific, limited point of view, explicitly subordinate to that of Boethius as author.

Examines the vast influence of Boethius in the Middle Ages, in logic, theology, and through the Consolation of Philosophy – in philosophy more broadly – and in literature. Among the authors discussed are Abelard, William of Conches, Gilbert of Poitiers, Alan of Lille, Aquinas, Jean de Meun, and Chaucer.

This chapter inaugurates the analysis of the Boethian tripartition of music, following the reordered twelfth-century presentation (as argued in the preceding chapter) and beginning with “human music,” the harmonies of the soul, body, and their conjunction. Ranging widely across the terrain of psychology (in Plato’s Phaedo), physiology (in the medieval reception of Galen), and cosmogony (the creation account in Plato’s Timaeus), the chapter argues that the “problem” of substance dualism was a “non-problem” for twelfth-century cosmologists precisely because of their harmonic conception of the body-soul union. The body is made suitable for ensoulment by dint of the proper proportioning of its parts, its “instrumental” harmony. The body as instrument (corpus organicum) is gladly received by the soul, through which it exercises its otherwise voiceless agency. The soul’s affect and the body’s agency together forestall the vulnerability of the fragile conjunction that is the life of the human organism.

This chapter discusses Glosule and Note dunelmenses, two Priscian commentaries written by William of Conches written between ca. 1080 and ca. 1150. The Glosule and the related glosses inspired William's commentary on Priscian's Institutiones grammaticae, which deals with theoretical questions related to grammar. The Glosule was intended to harmonise grammatical concepts with contemporary interest in logic, mainly by exploring such issues as the purposes of the various parts of speech. William's commentary also offers a theoretical analysis of syntax and the arrangement of the parts of speech based on natural order.

This chapter explores the discursive creation of the world in books, specifically the late-ancient and medieval encyclopedic organizations of knowledge through the division of philosophy. Tracing the vicissitudes of the two primary models inherited from antiquity—the Peripatetic bipartition into theory and practice and the Stoic/Academic tripartition into logic, ethics, and physics—the chapter documents the shifting orders and subdivisions that brought the discipline of music into close contact with both mathematics and physics, numbers and things. The proper application of the division of philosophy is both an exegetical strategy, which ensures that arguments are analyzed within the disciplines to which they properly belong, and an ontological hierarchy, which ensures that the ascent to true knowledge proceeds along the proper “order of learning,” from lower to higher realities.

The topic of the inadequacy of human language to express the divine reality witnessed in the Empyrean shapes Dante’s Paradiso. Stated at the very beginning of the first canto, it is accounted for by Beatrice in the fourth as part and parcel of the solution to the doubt occasioned by the literal interpretation of a passage in Plato’s Timaeus. The fourth canto has been interpreted along the lines of the distinction between the literal sense (integumentum) and the intended meaning (sensus), as voiced especially by William of Conches. The present article suggests that Dante’s ideas about intellectual vision, memory, and the language apt to express them are best understood against a background that also includes Plotinus’s treatment of Platonic myths, as stated especially in his remarks on the Timaeus. As a possible intermediate source, Macrobius’s Commentary on the Dream of Scipio is suggested.

The Platonic understanding of efficient causation restricts this entirely to the operations of the soul. Bodies are not to be counted as substances, and therefore lack what is required for involvement in genuine relations of efficient causation, a view both affirmed and entrenched within the Christian tradition by Augustine’s discussion of the sense in which the human soul exercises free will. The ninth-century figure Eriugena presents a detailed picture of how nature looks under this assumption. By the late eleventh century, however, a tradition of natural speculation is clearly developing, which is open to the idea of construing relations of efficient causation as holding among bodies. Even in the writings of Anselm we find early intimations of this outlook. But we see it present in developed and unmistakable form in the scientific speculations of such twelfth-century figures as Adelard of Bath and William of Conches.

This chapter discusses grammatical commentaries from the ‘school’ of Ralph of Beauvais, written around 1165–1175. Ralph of Beauvais was a preeminent authority on grammar and literature who knew and used the work of William of Conches. He authored a commentary on Donatus's Ars minor and a grammatical commentary on Ovid and Lucan known as the Liber Tytan. The latter is quoted in the Promisimus gloss on Priscian. Ralph's surviving writings deal with the development of syntax and the reapplication of grammar to the study of the classical authors.