What is consolation and why is mourning so often bound up with erotic desire? This collection of essays explores consolation and mourning in the varied, sometimes provocative, readings of Boethius and of Stoic consolation by French, English, Italian and German authors, including Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machaut, Chaucer, Wyatt and Queen Elizabeth I. The contributors consider how they remodeled the discourse of consolation through parody and satire, interrogating the limits of a consolatory rhetoric.

“The essays in this volume examine a range of late medieval texts in French, English, Italian, and German, many of which engage explicitly with the formative model of Boethius. But this is far more than simply another book on Boethius in the Middle Ages. The authors combine literary analysis with a consideration of the philosophical, theological, and medical contexts that inform medieval writing about desire, loss, mourning, and consolation. Collectively, they open up exciting new perspectives on the medieval reception and rethinking of Boethius, and on the very topic of consolation itself.”--Sylvia Huot, Pembroke College, Cambridge

"This volume revitalizes one of the best-loved texts of pre-modern times, written by a man seeking consolation in the face of torture and imminent death. The editors bring together an exceptionally talented group whose essays explore how and why Boethius proved so poignant a figure to readers such as Dante and Elizabeth I. And they show how this text's consolatory pleasures might prove, through various and ingenious adaptations across Europe, sexual as well as philosophical."--David Wallace, Judith Rodin Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

"The editors have assembled a remarkably cohesive body of scholarship in dialogue by an array of scholarly experts from America, the United Kingdom, and Canada . . . this book represents an excellent addition to Palgrave's already lush series, The New Middle Ages"--Speculum