It is well known that Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy (written c. 524) had an enormous influence on European vernacular writers in the Middle Ages and was translated many times into many languages during that period. Fewer people are aware of the continuity of this tradition in English. King Alfred (or possibly not: the attribution has now been questioned) and Chaucer were not its only famous English translators. The sixty-year-old Queen Elizabeth translated it in 1593 while sheltering in Windsor from a plague (just as her successor and namesake is doing at the moment); and Richard Fanshawe, Henry Vaughan, Alexander Pope, and Samuel Johnson all made English versions of some of the verse passages. Altogether there were eleven complete translations between 1550 and 1800, and a number more from 1897 onward. Only during the nineteenth century does the work seem to have been neglected.

Edited by Brian Donaghey, Noel Harold Kaylor, Philip Edward Phillips, and Paul E. Szarmach, Remaking Boethius provides its readers with an extraordinarily comprehensive amount of information on this whole tradition, from the time of Alfred to the present day. The approach is avowedly encyclopedic. The bulk of the volume is taken up by presentations, translation by translation, that follow a standard format, which includes biographical information on the translator, discussion of sources (other translations, commentaries, and sometimes editions) used by the translator, the character of the translation, its intended audience and its influence, its linguistic peculiarities, editions and/or manuscripts of it, bibliography, samples (usually the first prose of Book I and the most famous verse section, Book III, m.9). Partial translations, translations of just the verse passages, mislabeled or spurious translations, and modern English versions of the Old English translation are also catalogued in separate sections. The sections “Some Minor Uses of Translations or Adaptation of Passages” includes, among other pieces, a fascinating ballad by Thomas Wyatt, based on three of Boethius's poems, and another section focuses on two early discussions about translating the Consolation.

This will be, at the least, a valuable reference book. Many of the translations catalogued here are hardly known, and the editors are the first to investigate them. Even for the well-known versions, such as those by Chaucer or Queen Elizabeth, the editors bring together all the relevant information in a way that has not been done before. For anyone working on the influence of the Consolation in England, this volume will be an indispensable resource. It will also be of value for specialists in English literature and language who wish to compare versions of the same text made in different periods.

Some might wonder whether the catalogue needed to have been extended up to the present. There is an obvious historical interest in seeing the range of, say, seventeenth-century translations, but are the late twentieth-century ones of the same interest? Yet, in fact, the multiplicity of ways in which the recent translators render the same passages is fascinating. Take for example the phrase perpetua . . . ratione in the first line of Book III, m. 9, which is rendered variously as “everlasting law,” “eternal reason,” “everlasting reason,” “perpetual order,” “perpetual reason,” “reason everlasting,” “everlastingly by your own reason,” and “eternal order.”

The plan of the book leaves the editors little room to display their own thoughts or judgments. The one place where they have the chance to speak in their own voices is in the “General Assessment” sections, which follow the extracts and precede the bibliography in each entry. Yet these tend to be bland, and the editors often resort to quoting other authorities. For the more recent translations, they read as if they were school reports written by teachers determined to encourage their pupils by finding all the positive points in their work they can. Nonetheless, the intrinsic interest of the material the editors have painstakingly assembled, and the clarity with which it is displayed, make the book, despite its repetitive organization, a surprisingly readable one. It is a pity that, given the price and the absence, at least so far, of an electronic edition, the volume is likely to sit on the shelves of the reference sections of libraries, since it is so stimulating as a place to browse, not just for Boethius specialists, but for anyone with an interest in the history of English literature.