Philosophy as medicine: the book Boethius wrote in a prison cell

A Roman senator waits for execution at Pavia and writes a dialogue in which Philosophy treats him like a patient, from mild medicine to strong. What the book is, how it was meant to be heard, and why it holds almost no Christ.

26 Oct 2026

Read the essay on Substack ↗See the Instagram carousel ↗

Talks and interviews

• Peter Adamson: Peter Adamson: The Bitter Pill: Lady Philosophy as Healer in Boethius’ Consolation ↗
  Philosophy and Medicine at KCL · talk page
  • 27:55 Philosophy as healer: mild medicine, then strong
• John Marenbon: Ep 36: The Consolation of Philosophy [feat. John Marenbon] ↗
  Dogs with Torches · talk page
  • 8:25 Boethius as an author in his own right, not only a conduit
• Peter Adamson: GRIPh Lecture: Philosophy in the Islamic World - Peter Adamson ↗
  Studium Generale Groningen · talk page
  • 33:11 What Latin Europe had of Aristotle: Boethius's logic
• Peter Adamson: HoP 118 - Fate, Hope and Clarity - Boethius ↗
  history of philosophy without any gaps · talk page
  • 3:06 Boethius as a Roman aristocrat at the end of antiquity

Books

• Victor Watts (trans.), The Consolation of Philosophy (Penguin, 1999). The readable modern translation.
• John Marenbon (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Boethius (Cambridge University Press, 2009), with Christopher Magee on the Good and morality and Danuta Shanzer on the Consolation.
• Stephen Blackwood, The Consolation of Boethius as Poetic Liturgy (Oxford University Press, 2015), on the metres as the medicine.
• Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text (University of Chicago Press, 1993), on reading as a spoken, bodily act.

Listen

• Sequentia (Benjamin Bagby, Hanna Marti, Norbert Rodenkirchen) sing the opening lament, Carmina qui quondam, reconstructed from eleventh-century neumes (Cambridge University, YouTube). ↗
• Cambridge University, Reconstructing the Songs of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, the project site with a free performing edition. ↗

Free online texts

• Boethius: The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy (Loeb Classical Library, 1918), Latin with English. ↗
• W. J. Sedgefield, King Alfred's Old English Version of Boethius (Oxford, 1899). ↗
• W. W. Skeat (ed.), Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1894), with the Boece. ↗

Thinkers in this post

Peter Adamson John Marenbon Stephen Blackwood Christopher Magee Danuta Shanzer Ivan Illich Michael Sells Henry Corbin