Introduction

Forging Boethius begins to recover the historical and literary importance of De disciplina’s forged Boethian voice along with the worldly Boethianisms it instantiated and fostered. This chapter begins by outlining De disciplina’s contents to introduce the worldly scholarly persona it fabricates for Boethius. It focuses on the thirteenth-century contexts that made De disciplina’s rewriting of Boethius possible and believable by situating the work within the reacquisition of Aristotle, the rise of the universities, and its earliest reception. The chapter also focuses on theoretical speculation regarding why an important and influential work has been so neglected by modern critics. Forging Boethius maps the multiform and variegated Boethianisms that took shape and were reshaped by De disciplina to show how each generation of Boethian reception reveals the preoccupations and scholarly self-conceptions of its readers. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.