ABSTRACT
Scholars in the fifteenth century also turned to Boethius and the medieval Boethian corpus to negotiate their intellectual identities as historical philology and advent of print altered the scholarly landscape. Lorenzo Valla’s incendiary critique of Boethius reveals the relatively mild and preservationist treatment Boethius’s corpus and especially De disciplina received from other, later humanist editors, and commentators. This chapter explores Valla’s rhetorically rich and darkly satirical portrayal of Boethius and his texts exemplifies a playful fifteenth-century rewriting of Boethius that acknowledges the philosopher’s importance to the schoolmen—to people like Pseudo-Boethius—while Valla also distances his own work from Boethius. It shows that Badius Ascensius retains a preservationist demeanor toward De disciplina. Badius continued to tinker with the framing of the Consolatio and De disciplina in ways that suggest a refinement of these texts for his audience and their interests. Focusing on De disciplina’s exit, underplays its tenacious persistence as a living part of that corpus from the 1230s to the 1520s.
