Boethius, De Consolatione Philosophiae, in Latin, leaf from an illuminated manuscript on vellum [Italy (perhaps Florence), fourteenth century]

a leaf, 315mm. by 230mm., 22 lines in a high grade angular bookhand, initials formed from ornamental penstrokes and separated from beginning of lines of verse, full border of the continuous gloss of the early fourteenth-century English author William Wheatley (see below) in smaller hand, rubrics and paragraph marks in red, two illuminated initials on blue or pink grounds with scrolling coloured acanthus leaves and large teardrop-like bezants, recovered from the binding of a series of Florentine historical works, partly by the Florentine humanist Matteo Palmieri, with sixteenth-century inscriptions identifying those works on its blank back, with scuffs, rubbing to initials, folds and small holes in places (with minor affect to 3 of glosses), overall in fair and presentable condition

This leaf is most probably the only relic to survive from a once magnificent copy of Boethius’ De Consolatione Philosophiae, the most widely copied work of secular literature in medieval Europe. He was born c.480 into a prominent Roman family and after the fall of the last Roman Emperor he became a senator in the service of the Ostrogothic king, Theodoric the Great. He rose to be magister officiorum, the head of all government, but was consumed in scandal, imprisoned and after a year-long confinement, executed. It was during that year that he wrote this work, as the crowning achievement of a life spent trying to preserve and continue the scholarship of the ancient world.  It is a deeply personal work, imbued with the trials of his descent into disgrace, and through a dialogue between the author and Philosophy it addresses the existence of wrong-doing in a world governed by God.

This leaf contains part of Book III, in which Philosophy addresses the author on the empty nature of noble birth. The commentary, here opening “Omne hominum genus. sextum metrum hujus tertii …” and “Solum autem illi sunt ignobiles …”, is the uncommon early fourteenth-century gloss of William Wheatley (published online by the Corpus Thomisticum), who studied at Oxford and Paris, and taught at Stamford in 1309 and Lincoln in 1316, finally becoming the rector of Yatesbury in Wiltshire.