One of the throughfares between The Consolation of Philosophy and “The Differend,” is a concern with illegibility.  The Consolation closes on Lady Philosophy’s final argument, in which she asserts that Boethius misinterprets God’s providence as pre-vision because he is bound to the human conception of linear time.  God, whereas, experiences all time at once. To try to comprehend God’s mode of being and experience of time as a human is…

The juxtaposition between the prose and poetry is quite interesting, and I wonder what boundaries it sets in terms of the subject matter. What’s particularly interesting is the incongruity between Lady Philosophy’s words at the beginning–the muses “will only make [Boethius’s] condition worse”–with Boethius’s continued interest in poetic forms (4). Do the boundaries between the poetry and the prose change throughout the text as Boethius explores different forms of consolation?…