The Consolatio philosophiae of the Roman statesman and philosopher Boethius (fifth/sixth century) was read and studied intensely in medieval western Europe and repeatedly translated into vernacular languages. Medieval commentaries on this text and translations of it claim attention today as case studies in a history of reading, for they exemplify the practices of medieval literary scholasticism. In an English context, the final flowering of this reading tradition may be placed in the year 1556, when John Cawoode printed a new translation of the Consolatio by a ‘George Coluile, alias Coldewel’. The translator remains unidentified. The translation is a medieval throwback in its treatment of Boethius’s text. Whereas subsequent English translators of the Consolatio separate text from commentary, Colvile permitted these categories to interpenetrate. He transmitted a wealth of exegetical material traceable to a commentary on the Consolatio attributed falsely to Thomas Aquinas. Pseudo-Thomas’s commentary and Boethius’s Consolatio were often printed together after their editio princeps in 1473. Colvile probably worked from a book printed in Lyon between 1486 and 1498.

This chapter introduces the principal methodologies used in the book. It describes the existing tools for the study of Old and Middle English, including grammars, dictionaries, handbooks and corpora, and explains that while their direct documentation of twelfth-century English is scanty, the information they contain can be reconceptualised to help date texts to the twelfth century, assess the likely effect of twelfth-century texts on their readers and evaluate the extent to which they inherited earlier conventions for writing English. This approach is exemplified with reference to four different English versions of Ps 111.9 found in manuscripts copied in the final two-thirds of the twelfth century and which are typical of the kinds of text that the book as a whole treats: understudied, textually complex and requiring a gamut of philological techniques to be fully understood and contextualised.

The question of the treatment of the Steward Malvolio is one of the crucial interpretive issues in Twelfth Night, and the placement of audience compassion is central to the history of that debate. Recent readings focusing on the social function of laughter have reached diverging conclusions. Is Malvolio the legitimate victim of a ‘community of laughers’, or does laughter fail to achieve social correction and cohesion in the play? Elisabetta Tarantino argues that the play’s audience is expected to achieve a higher understanding of the motives why compassion may be granted or withheld by different groups of characters within the play. Reading the play in its international political context, she argues that the ambivalent representation of Malvolio is a central part of the play’s semantic strategy. On the basis of new intertextual evidence, she suggests that Twelfth Night addresses issues of community and compassion in a direct historical and political sense, with reference to the contemporary relationship between England and Europe.