BOETHIAN HUMOR AND THE PSEUDO-BOETHIAN

DE DISCIPLINA SCOLARIUM

Brooke Hunter

Abstract: The Pseudo-Boethian De disciplina scolarium reveals a facet of the medieval figuration of Boe­
thius largely neglected in accounts of medieval Boethianisms, a humorous, raunchy Boethius who tells
ambiguously moral exempla. Considered authentic from its “rediscovery” in 1230-1240 until 1498 and be­
yond, this widely-read advice text for scholars, written in the voice of Boethius, modifies the auctor’s seri­
ous self-presentation in the Consolatio Philosophiae to fit within the tonal and thematic conventions of
thirteenth-century grammar school teaching texts. These texts—such as Maximianus’s Elegies, which in­
cludes a similar sexual and morally ambiguous Boethius—use titillation, violence, and transgression as
pedagogical tools for young students. Rather than an odd outlier or exceptionally poor forgery, De disci-
plina’s playful, ironic Boethius would have seemed normal to medieval readers used to such schoolroom
conventions. De disciplina’s Boethius, and his neglect, reveals a gap in our understanding of medieval Bo-
ethianisms and medieval conceptions of auctoritas.
Keywords: Pseudo-Boethius, De disciplina scolarium, Boethius, Maximianus, humor, pedagogy, Boethi-
anism, medieval grammar schools, serio-comedy, exempla, auctoritas, pseudepigrapha.

When scholars think of how high- and late- medieval readers envisioned Boethius, we
probably do not usually think of sexual impotence, ridiculous and pompous school­
masters, or humorous exempla of ambiguous moral rectitude; I will argue that perhaps
we should. Around 1230-1240 a newly “rediscovered” work was added to the Boe-
thian corpus. That work was De disciplina scolarium, a pseudepigraphum that presents
itself as Boethius’s final text, written after the Consolatio Philosophiae as Boethius
awaited execution. Contemporary scholarly conceptions of Boethius come primarily
from authentic Boethian works, most prominently from the life details he provides in
the autobiographical Consolatio, in which Boethius portrays his prisoner-avatar as a
serious and melancholic philosopher contemplating his impending death and fallen
fortunes. Medieval readers, however, well into the sixteenth century, supplemented the
Consolatio’s vision of Boethius with De disciplina’s figuration, in which “Boethius”
presents himself as a comical schoolmaster musing over his salad days at university
and advising students on the mundane details of scholarly life.1 This “Boethius” inter­
mingles his advice with memorably silly exempla: on a sex addict who bit off his fa­
ther’s nose, on a Master so ignorant he thought Aeneas was a woman, or on “Boe­
thius’s” implicit approval of a girl who prostituted herself to fund her brother’s educa­
tion. Recent studies of medieval Boethianisms have focused attention on the changing
visions of Boethian philosophy offered by commentaries, vernacular translations, and
adaptations throughout the Middle Ages.2 With the exception of Andrea Denny-

*Department of English, Villanova University, 800 E. Lancaster Ave Villanova, PA 19085,

brooke.hunter@villanova.edu. A very early version of this article was presented at the 2012 Congress of the
New Chaucer Society, Portland, OR. The author would like to thank Andrea Denny-Brown who suggested
she look at De disciplina and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.
1 To normalize De disciplina’s figuration of Boethius in the medieval Boethian corpus, I avoid referring
to its Boethian persona as Pseudo-Boethius. I reserve that name for the author of De disciplina only. The
pseudonymous nature of De disciplina’s persona will be noted with quotation marks to distinguish its im­
agined “Boethius” from the authentic Roman philosopher, Boethius.
2 For an altered Boethius see Elizabeth Elliott, Remembering Boethius: Writing Aristocratic Identity in
Late Medieval French and English Literatures (Farnham 2012), who argues that remembering the Consola­
tio shaped late medieval life writing and aristocratic identities.

Viator 46 No. 1 (2015) 161-180. 10.1484/J.VIATOR.5.103505

162 BROOKE HUNTER

Brown’s recent Fashioning Change, however, De disciplina remains largely un­

addressed despite its widespread popularity and having been considered an authentic
work for over three hundred years, from ca. 1230-1240, when it was likely composed,
to 1498 and beyond.3 Moreover, any reticence to believe that medieval readers credi­
bly attributed De disciplina to Boethius is belied by testimonies of authenticity from
such influential writers and commentators as Vincent de Beauvais, Roger Bacon,
Nicholas Trevet, and Richard de Fournival among others.
That no major study of medieval Boethianisms discusses De disciplina at any
length is perhaps telling of a critical skepticism of or discomfort with its playful and
ironic “Boethius.” On the rare occasion that De disciplina’s “Boethius” has been criti­
cally examined, he has been judged an oddity in need of explanation, an appraisal that
is not reflected in the unproblematic acceptance the text met with in the Middle Ages.
The depiction of Boethius in Maximianus’s Elegies (6th c.), as an ambiguously moral
procurer of sex for a young friend, has also been held apart as somehow discrete from
medieval conceptions of Boethius, despite the fact that, like De disciplina, it was a
widely-read grammar school teaching text. The conviction that there is something
strange about these Boethian voices reveals much about the contours of our own con­
temporary imaginings of who Boethius is, and who we think he was to his medieval
audience. But what if neither De disciplina’s “Boethius,” nor Maximianus’s, seemed
out of character to medieval readers? Normalizing De disciplina’s “Boethius” as an
accepted part of the medieval Boethian persona reveals the conservative cast of con­
temporary Boethianisms and our projection of them back onto a past innocent of this
singular prim seriousness. On the one hand, giving De disciplina the attention it de­
serves reveals a significantly more capacious medieval vision of Boethius than current
scholarship allows. On the other hand, the surprising nonchalance with which De dis­
ciplina has been ignored or considered odd or irrelevant, despite the significant terri­
tory it occupied in the medieval Boethian corpus reveals a more general critical occlu­
sion or hesitancy to accept irreverent or humorous medieval depictions of auctores as
significant.4 De disciplina helps us to see this gap and the scholarly oversight it ena­
bles.34

3 Andrea Denny-Brown, Fashioning Change: The Trope o f Clothing in High- and Late-Medieval Eng­
land (Columbus 2012), argues that Boethius was seen as an expert on material and clothing culture, and that
De disciplina exemplifies this, see esp. 55-59.
4 For the lack of discussions of De disciplina in studies of medieval Boethianisms, see A Companion to
Boethius in the Middle Ages, ed. Noel Harold Kaylor, Jr. and Philip Edward Phillips (Leiden, Boston 2012),
where it is referenced three times: to cite Edward Gibbon’s identification of it as the “spurious” origin of the
story of Boethius’s Athenian education, 4; to note it as a misattribution, 266; and to note that it is cited by
Hugo von Trimberg, 274. De disciplina is referenced only as a misattribution in The Cambridge Companion
to Boethius ed. John Marenbon (New York 2009); and John Marenbon, Boethius (New York 2003). It is
listed as a text used by Nicholas Trevet in Chaucer’s Boece and the Medieval Tradition o f Boethius, ed. A.
J. Minnis (Cambridge 1993) 4, 5. Howard R. Patch, The Tradition o f Boethius: A Study o f His Importance in
Medieval Culture (New York 1935), references it four times in notes and twice in the body: to note it as a
misattribution, 4, and to note Roger Bacon’s interest in it, 33. It is not mentioned in Boethius in the Middle
Ages: Latin and Vernacular Traditions o f the Consolatio Philosophiae, ed. Maarten J. F. M. Hoenen and
Lodi Nauta (Leiden 1997); Noel Harold Kaylor, Jr., The Medieval Consolation of Philosophy: An Annotated
Bibliography (New York 1992); The Medieval Tradition o f Boethius: Studies in the Vernacular
Translations o f the De Consolatione Philosophiae, ed. A. J. Minnis (Cambridge 1987); Boethi-us, His Life,
Thought, and Influence ed. Margaret Gibson (Oxford 1981); or Henry Chadwick, Boethius: The Consola­
tions o f Music, Logic, Theology, and Philosophy (Oxford 1981).
BOETHIAN HUMOR AND THE PSEUDO-BOETHIAN DE DISCIPLINA SCOLARIUM 163

Situating De disciplina alongside other serio-comic grammar school teaching texts

that make use of puerile fantasies, explicit sexuality, and ambiguous exempla to teach
otherwise upright lessons, clarifies the pedagogical purpose of its supposedly odd Bo-
ethian humor and the acceptance that it met. De disciplina's simultaneously ironic and
authoritative serio-comic “Boethius” may seem like a parody of the serious philoso­
pher. Rather than mocking Boethius's earnest self-presentation in the Consolatio,
however, De disciplina transforms the auctor’s voice to emulate pedagogical works
such as the similarly-titled Disciplina clericalis by Petrus Alfonsi, Geoffrey of
Vinsauf's Poetria Nova (ca. 1210), or Maximianus's Elegies. For much of the Middle
Ages, humor, and often transgressive humor, was considered a natural pedagogical
tool to stimulate interest and memory in the youngest scholars. Part of the humor of
these works often comes from incongruities between the solemn lessons the texts pur­
port to advance and the narrative vehicles that convey them. The perception of humor­
ous suggestion in these texts is itself a hermeneutic act, for it is generally situated in
implicit, alternate, and symptomatic readings that the overt lessons might very well
disavow. The humor may also come from the reader recognizing the ridiculousness of
the wider implications of what is advocated, or from the silly self-narrative the speaker
constructs. Such serio-comic works generate a double-hermeneutic, that is, they model
and reward creative forms of reading between the lines alongside the other more
straightforward interpretive offerings traced in the commentary tradition. Rather than
showing itself to be an odd outlier or an exceptionally poor forgery, then, De disci­
plinais playful, ironic “Boethius” would not have seemed strange or out of place to a
medieval reader used to the eroticism, titillation, and transgression often found in texts
used for early Latin training. Set against the background of these grammar school
teaching texts, De disciplina's “Boethius,” and his neglect, reveals a gap in our under­
standing of medieval auctoritas more generally.

I. BOETHIAN HUMOR
There are at least 140 extant manuscripts of De disciplina, more manuscripts than Bo­
ethius's popular De Musica.5 Olga Weijers, the work's editor, has noted the difficulty
in reconstructing direct relationships between the extant manuscripts, suggesting that a
large number of intermediaries are lost.6 Although doubt about De disciplina's authen­
ticity was first expressed in print in 1498, the work continued to be attributed to Boe­
thius in publication and remained popular well into the sixteenth century.7 De disci-567

5 Olga Weijers, Pseudo-Boèce De disciplina scolarium (Leiden 1976), lists 136 manuscripts, but a
consultation of the indices of the Codices Boethiani: A Conspectus o f the Manuscripts o f the Works o f Boe­
thius, vols. I—IV, ed. Margaret Gibson, Lesley Smith, and Marina Passalacqua (London 1995-2009), reveals
four more manuscripts she does not list: MS Manchester, Chetham's Library 6682 (Mun. A. 7.67) Codices
Boethiani I, 159; MS Melk, Stiftsbibliothek, 928 (formerly 907/Q.46) Weijers lists this as including only a
commentary, Codices Boethiani II, Austria, 32; MS Basel, Universitätsbibliothek, F. VI. 59 Codices Boethi­
ani II, Switzerland, 9; MS Milano, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, H 170 inf., Codices Boethiani III, 188. There are
135 extant copies of De Musica.
6 Weijers, Pseudo-Boèce (n. 5 above) 31.
7 The Universal Short Title Catalogue directed by Andrew Pettegree and Malcom Walsby and hosted
by the University of St. Andrews at http://ustc.ac.uk/index.php, shows that between 1473 and 1530 44% of
all works published under Boethius's name included De disciplina, often alongside the Consolatio. From the
first printing of De disciplina in 1476 until 1530, De disciplina was printed 81 times throughout Europe, 65
164 BROOKE HUNTER

plina was probably written at Paris, or perhaps Oxford, sometime between 1230 and
1240 and was taken up as an authentic part of the Boethian corpus quickly, endorsed
by Vincent de Beauvais and Roger Bacon.8 Richard de Fournival includes De disci­
plina in his Biblionomia (ca. 1260), a list of texts that should be housed in an ideal
library, attributing the work to Boethius.9 The acceptance of De disciplina is also wit­
nessed by the attention of the influential commentator Nicholas Trevet. Trevet men­
tions De disciplina's recommendation to read Seneca in both of his Seneca commen­
taries, and quotes from the work in his Consolatio commentary (ca. 1300).10 One of
the earliest commentaries on De disciplina (ca. 1309) was written by William of
Wheteley, an English grammar school master.11 The commentary with its thirteen
preliminary quaestiones on the work, form a lectio that Wheteley very well may have
used to teach the work in his grammar school classroom, an unsurprising venue given
that the work's subject matter is how to navigate one's education.12
The earliest doubters of De disciplina's authenticity were humanists who used lin­
guistic evidence to denounce the work as a fake. Alexander Hegius questioned “Boe­
thius's” authorship calling it “that most barbarous work, Scholarium Disciplina that
Boethius is falsely said to have written” and noting that “the little book is so full of
silly tropes, that it is most unsuitable for the training of children.”13 Jodocus Badius
Ascensius also doubted De disciplinais authenticity and berated it as “having been
largely written in a trivial and pedestrian style.”14 Modern scholars have similarly

times with the Consolatio, and 16 on its own. In this period, 42% of Consolatio printings also included De
disciplina.
8 Michael Johnson, “Pseudo-Boethius a Matter of Style,” Acta 7 (1980) 109-129, at 112; Patch, Tradi­
tion o f Boethius (n. 4 above) 33. For more on the possible place and date of De disciplinais origin see
Weijers, Pseudo-Boèce (n. 5 above) 8-11.Weijers offers the intriguing suggestion that “Boethius's” discus­
sion of the scholars he saw in Paris begging to be taught the arts could be an oblique reference to the closure
of the University of Paris in 1229. The late 1220s and early 1230s were a volatile time for the University of
Paris. The school was closed from 1229-1231 in the wake of deadly town-gown clashes. This period also
marked the entry of the mendicant orders into the University and the power struggles that erupted with
secular clerics. See also Harry Francis Sebastian “William of Wheteley's (Fl. 1309-1316) Commentary on
the Pseudo Boethius' Tractate De disciplina scolarium and Medieval Grammar School Education” (Ph.D.
diss., Columbia 1970). Sebastian, 289-290, suggests a date “in the third decade of the thirteenth century
during the period when the ecclesiastical ban on the teaching of Aristotelian philosophia naturalis, which
had been confirmed by the statute of 1215 regulating the curriculum of the faculty of arts, was still in ef­
fect.” He suggests this because of the long and somewhat odd list of questions by master Crato found sand­
wiched in the middle of an exemplum about an inconstant scholar. The questions deal with topics such as
cosmology, meteorology, astronomy and natural history.
9 Richard de Fournival, La Biblionomie de Richard de Fournival, Le Cabinet des manuscrits de la
Bibliothèque nationale, vol. 2, ed. Léopold Victor Delisle (Paris 1874) 518-535, at 530-531.
10 These references have made many scholars suggest that Trevet may have also written a commentary
on De disciplina, but none has ever been found.
11 For more on Wheteley who served as a master in Stamford in 1309 and taught in Lincoln in 1316 see
Sebastian, “William of Wheteley's Commentary” (n. 8 above) 8-14.
12 Wheteley also adapted Trevet's Consolatio commentary for use in his grammar school classroom.
13 “... barbarissimo illo opere, quod Scholarium Disciplina ... quod Boetium scripsisse mentiuntur. Qui
libellus tam ineptis tropis refertus est [ut] indignissimus sit quo pueri instituantur.” Cited in J. Ijsewjin,
“Alexander Hegius (+1498) Invectiva in modos significandi,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 7
(1971) 299-318, at 310.
14 “. cum triviali magis ac pedestri stilo conscriptum sit.” Cited in Bibliographie des impressions et
des oeuvres de Josse Badius Ascensius Imprimeur et Humaniste 1462—1535 vol. 2, ed. Philippe Renouard
(Paris 1908) 197.
BOETHIAN HUMOR AND THE PSEUDO-BOETHIAN DE DISCIPLINA SCOLARIUM 165

found De disciplinais Latin “never very lucid,” or even “torturous.”15 The focus on
Pseudo-Boethius’s Latin as poor or strange, however, has largely limited the critical
conversation to style, revealing little about the cultural work the text performs. De
disciplina’s pseudepigraphic status, matched with its denigration as an anachronistic
and shoddy forgery has left the text in much the same state of neglect as Trevet’s Con­
solatio commentary after it was denounced by Pierre Courcelle as plagiarism.16 De
disciplina ’s place in the medieval Boethian corpus, then, has been largely ignored de­
spite the prominence of its thirteenth-century representation of Boethius.
Several descriptions of the work exist but, since it is little known, I will provide an
account here.17 De disciplina gives practical advice in six sections: on what scholars
should study and when; on the proper submission of a student to his master; on the
necessity of constancy to one’s studies; on good study habits and how to deal with
servants, friends, and money; on transitioning from student to Master; and on teaching
and disputations. The Boethius of the Consolatio who is schooled by Philosophy to
treat worldly things with contempt and to remember his heavenly home, contrasts with
De disciplina’s “Boethius” who, as he also awaits death, dispenses tips on buying food
in bulk to save money and suggests when it is appropriate to cry or inflict abuse while
trying to extort funds from tightfisted parents. Although unnamed, “Boethius” is rec­
ognizable from the references to his political troubles and the works he claims to have
authored, a work on the trinity and, apparently, the Consolatio, since he notes he wrote
De disciplina “with philosophical consolation proceeding.”18 “Boethius” introduces
himself as exhausted by his recent work commenting on Aristotle and “having been
gnawed away by the tortures of the inhuman king of the Goths.”19 To the fictional
account of his eighteen years as a student in Athens, “Boethius” adds exempla about
scholars who would have benefited from his advice. We meet “Calvus” (Baldy), a
victim of servant-inflicted head trauma; Ganymede, the clotheshorse; and the poor son
of Timothy, who was ill-advisedly allowed to attend school despite his castration, lep-156789

15 John Adamson, “De Disciplina Scholarium: A Medieval Student’s Handbook,” ‘The Illiterate Anglo­
Saxon’ and Other Essays on Education, Medieval and Modern (Cambridge 1946) 90-116, at 100; and
Johnson, “Pseudo-Boethius” (n. 8 above) 119.
16 Pierre Courcelle, La Consolation de Philosophie dans la Tradition Littéraire Antecedents et Postérité
de Boèce (Paris 1967) 318-319. In the wake of Courcelle’s contemptuous dismissal, Trevet’s commentary
received little scholarly attention despite its widespread popularity and influence. As Alistair Minnis and
Lodi Nauta have shown, to call Trevet a plagiarist is to misconstrue scholastic methodology and to adopt an
anachronistic perspective on the function of scholastic commentaries. See Minnis and Nauta, “More Pla­
tonico loquitur: What Nicholas Trevet really did to William of Conches,” Chaucer’s Boece and the Medie­
val Tradition o f Boethius (n. 4 above) 1-33.
17 See Sebastian, “William of Wheteley’s Commentary” (n. 8 above), esp. chap. 3; Adamson, “De
Disciplina Scholarium” (n. 15 above); and Eva Sanford, “De Disciplina Scholarium: A Mediaeval
Handbook on the Care and Training of Scholars,” The Classical Journal 28.2 (1932) 82-95. Scholarship
clustered in the 1930s and 40s, seeks to identify the true author or the location of its composition. See
Weijers, Pseudo-Boèce (n. 5 above) 3-11; Victor Scholderer, “Conradus, Boethius and Pseudo-Boethius,”
Speculum 22.2 (1947) 257-259; and Arpad Steiner, “The Authorship of De Disciplina Scholarium,”
Speculum 12.1 (1937) 81-84.
18 “... philosophico preveniente consolatu ...” Weijers, Pseudo-Boèce (n. 5 above) 93, with thanks to
the reviewer for the Latin correction. For the humor of “Boethius” see Michael Johnson, “A Critical Edition
of the Commentary by William of Wheteley of the Pseudo-Boethian Treatise ‘De disciplina scolarium’”
(Ph.D. diss, SUNY Buffalo 1982) 157-186.
19 “... inhumani regis Gottorum cruciatu corrosus ...” Ibid. 93. All translations are mine unless
otherwise noted.
166 BROOKE HUNTER

rosy, bandy-legs, and humpback and thus became the object of his classmates’ ridi­
cule. The pedestrian interests and mischievous comedy of this “Boethius,” who fo­
cuses on the satiation of humanity’s most basic longings, might seem a strange vision
to readers familiar with the Boethius of the Consolatio.
One of the critical problems of De disciplina is precisely how we are to read its
portrayal of “Boethius”; are his stories of slapstick violence, narcoleptic students, and
idiotic masters meant to be funny or is our modern sense of humor leading us to laugh
when we should not? After tracing the oddities of De disciplina’s tone and subject
matter, Michael Johnson suggests that the author’s “peculiar style” seems designed to
make “Boethius” appear “stupid, insensitive, or endowed with a sophisticated (?)
sense of humor.”20 Ultimately, Johnson concludes either that De disciplina is “an exer­
cise in self-inflated parody” meant to be “a reasonably transparent jeu d'esprit that
would not fool anyone” or that Pseudo-Boethius wrote poorly and strangely, on pur­
pose “as the self-indulgent sermonizing of, perhaps, a university professor who had
indeed some sensible advice to pass on to the next generation, but who also had a mis­
chievous sense of humor.”21 By deeming De disciplina a parody here, Johnson seems
to suggest that it spoofs or ridicules the serious, world-rejecting Boethius of the Con­
solatio. Recent theories of parody, however, have stressed that parodies need not de­
value or debase the original text they rework. As Linda Hutcheon suggests, they can
offer instead “an integrated structural modeling process of revising, replaying, invert­
ing, and ‘trans-contextualizing’ previous works of art.”22 Of course literature that re­
vises, replays, and transcontextualizes previous works also describes the vast majority
of medieval writing with its preference for imitation and derivation over originally.
This imitation that undergirds medieval conceptions of auctoritas, however, also en­
tails the creative alteration so commonly seen in translations and commentaries on
auctores. Rather than targeting Boethius for parodic mockery, then, I will show how
De disciplina’s imitation of Boethius rewrites the Boethian persona, not to make him
look insensitive or stupid, but to place him within the tonal conventions of school
texts, specifically those for younger students that used humor and titillation for mne­
monic purposes and to catalyze learning. Thus, Johnson’s second hypothesis, that
Pseudo-Boethius wrote “with a twinkle in his eye,” is closer to the mark.23 Although
we may find “Pseudo-Boethius and his strange prose ... difficult to interpret,” to a
medieval reader De disciplinais “Boethius” would not have seemed strange and, in­
stead, would have supported the auctor’s persona as a teacher and intellectual.
De disciplina’s humorous ventriloquism of “Boethius” imitates and creatively sup­
plements Boethius’s voice, indicating the very reverence it might seem to mock.
Alastair Minnis, in Medieval Theory o f Authorship, cites Hugutio of Pisa’s definition
of auctoritas as sententia digna imitatione, a profound saying worthy of imitation.24 In
the schools, imitatio meant the imitation of the style or voice of an auctor, and was

20 Johnson, “Pseudo-Boethius” (n. 8 above) 121.

21 Ibid. resp. 121, 124, 113.
22 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory o f Parody: The Teachings o f Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York
1985) 11.
23 Johnson, “Pseudo-Boethius” (n. 8 above) 113.
24 Alastair Minnis, Medieval Theory o f Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle
Ages, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia 1988) 10.
BOETHIAN HUMOR AND THE PSEUDO-BOETHIAN DE DISCIPLINA SCOLARIUM 167

practiced in exercises in which the student would mold his words to fit the rank, emo­
tions, gender, and situation of someone else, whether an historical or mythological
figure. The mimetic practice of imitatio indicated reverence for the auctor but, as Irene
Peirano has recently argued, these exercises balance the mimetic with a dose of per­
sonal flair and creative license: they encourage the schoolboy to let his imagination
expand on and fill in the details of known historical situations and biographies with
creative fictions.25 This creative license also functions as para-commentary; it is a
product of reception, revealing a latter-day interpretation and imagining of a past fig­
ure. Imitation signaled the authority of the mimicked voice, even as it licensed the
imitator to speak for the auctor.
While imitation of auctores suggests reverence, focusing too exclusively on the
reverence of the mimetic relationship between a medieval writer and his auctor can
obscure the inventive, creative, and even adversarial effects of imitatio, through which
the writer could alter, expand, or transform the auctor's voice. Rita Copeland's well-
known argument in Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages tem­
pers this reverence by asserting that the medieval literary-critical world was a compet­
itive inter- and intra-lingual community of reception, where commentaries and trans­
lations did not merely enhance the auctores, but also competed with them for prestige
and authority, often with the goal of ultimately displacing the original work, despite
their rhetoric of servitude and supplement.26 This competition is readily evident in
works of intentional pseudepigrapha, like De disciplina, that forgo even the rhetoric of
servitude often advanced by commentaries and instead appropriate authority through
impersonation. That is, pseudepigrapha seek not to displace authorial works, but to
alter the auctor's corpus from within through a form of imitatio that disavows its imi­
tation. De disciplina's usurpation of Boethius's voice balances between a conservative
equation of antiquity with auctoritas and a desire to rewrite “Boethius's” ancient voice
into a recognizably scholastic one, as I will show below.
De disciplinais at times transgressive attitude towards authority is seen in “Boe­
thius's” stories about foolish and fraudulent schoolmasters, which critique the very
auctoritas on which the text might seem to depend. In exempla that reveal De disci­
plina' s ironic relationship to authority, “Boethius” admonishes students not to rely too
heavily on books or schoolmasters, and instead encourages young scholars to develop
their own ideas. These stories of ridiculous masters exemplify the way in which De
disciplina's humor simultaneously upholds and undercuts traditional ideas about auc­
toritas. “Boethius,” the great master, while overtly admonishing students to respect
their teachers, also implicitly suggests that masters often inflate their importance or are
unworthy of the respect their title brings. “Boethius” tells of Master Iocarius (Jokester)
who for thirty years passed down his own ignorance in his teaching.27 Not only did
Iocarius mistake Aeneas for a woman, he had such an inflated sense of his title, mag-

25 Irene Peirano, The Rhetoric o f the Roman Fake: Latin Pseudepigrapha in Context (Cambridge 2012)
esp. 10-24.
26 Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions
and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge 1995).
27 triginta annis ignoranciam suam predictorum philosophorum gignasiis tradidit imbuendam.”
Weijers, Pseudo-Boèce (n. 5 above) 96.
168 BROOKE HUNTER

ister, that he refused to assign the word its correct meter, since “it is an absurd thing
for the first syllable of so great a name to be short.”28 “Boethius” suggests the
pompousness of masters when he advises them never to appear in public without an
entourage of noble scholars, lest they be thought unpopular. Masters are made to seem
insecure and inordinately sensitive to the esteem of others when he tells of one Master
Fronto (Bulging Forehead) who hanged himself because he lacked the mildness (man­
suetus) to accept the constant jibing of his noble students. There is the cautionary story
of Lucius, who, lacking mastery of his subject, was forced to pore over his books
whenever his students had questions, since he could neither remember his studies nor
think through the answer on his own. This exemplum reminds the student to pay at­
tention in school, but also teaches that recourse to textual authority is a flaw. The ad­
vice not to rely too much on authority is more pointed in the tale of Nigrio (Dimmer),
whose education taught him only to parrot others and not to think for himself: “Nigrio
noted down the teaching of Master Montanus with such confidence that [those teach­
ings were] all that progressed from his own mouth.”29 Nigrio often left his classroom
shamed because he, like Lucius, was unable to answer questions if they touched on
topics Master Montanus (Mountainous) had not addressed. To Nigrio, his Master’s
authority is insurmountably “mountainous,” but “Boethius” asserts that students must
scale that precipitous height for the intellectual good, even if it means moving beyond
the expertise of one’s teachers. As “Boethius” goes on to assert, “obviously, the most
miserable nature is always to use what has already been found and never to use what
ought to be discovered,” that is, never to think for oneself.30 Such stories of silly and
fraudulent scholars are meant to model bad scholarly behavior and poke fun at preten­
sions to intellectual authority. The sheer multitude of pompous and counterfeit intel­
lectuals, however, also encourages the reader to question the authority of his own
teacher, or even “Boethius.” In this way Pseudo-Boethius’s adoption of “Boethius’s”
voice moves beyond a simple bid for authority by subtly critiquing the notion of auc­
toritas.
This playful attitude towards authority is also found in De disciplina’s suggestive
humor. Its humor comes in part by the text’s subtle interpretive dissonance, what I am
calling De disciplina’s double hermeneutic, that simultaneously conveys both a seri­
ous lesson and a joke, sometimes at that lesson’s expense. In addition to Pseudo-Boe­
thius’s odd style, I believe that this interpretive incongruence is a large part of what
has caused contemporary scholars to perceive De disciplines “Boethius” as strange.
De disciplina is not alone, however, in associating Boethius with interpretive aporia;
for moral ambiguity is also part of the figuration of Boethius in Maximianus’s Elegies,
another depiction of Boethius, discussed in more detail below, that is often considered
odd by modern scholars. While I do not wish to suggest that De disciplina’s content is
solely humorous, the humor of the text perhaps needs more explanation than the more
straightforward advice on roommates or study habits.

28 . absurdum est tanti nominis primam breviari ...” Ibid.

29 Nigrio qui Montani magistri sui monitis in tantum confisus quod omne ab ipsius ore progressum
quaternis exarabat ...” Ibid. 120-121.
30 “Quippe miserrimi est ingenii semper inventis uti et numquam inveniendis.” Ibid. 121.
BOETHIAN HUMOR AND THE PSEUDO-BOETHIAN DE DISCIPLINA SCOLARIUM 169

An in depth look at De disciplina's transgressive humor can reveal how this humor
might even be said to teach a way of reading through the perception of suggestive in­
terpretations and the irreverent juxtaposition of topics. In section four of De disciplina,
“Boethius” offers an invective against tightfisted parents and advises students on how
to part unwilling progenitors from their money: “The detestable, crooked grasping of
parents is softened with the earnestness of prayer, and is unstitched with many and
tedious conversations, is enticed with timely tears, is blinded by false promises, and is
dissolved by affectionate little presents; flattery, if it is timely, can break through
[tightfistedness], if less timely, it can strengthen it.”31 Although this may be sound
advice, here it incongruously depicts sober “Boethius” advocating crocodile tears, lies,
and flattery. The humor here lies partly in the doubleness of “Boethius's” voice, in the
tension between what is said overtly—it is probably effective advice—and the humor
of advocating bad behavior in a serious pedagogical context. Following this advice,
“Boethius” tells of his own familial monetary struggles. Apparently, “Boethius's”
family cut off their monetary support for the young auctor during his time in Athens,
after one “Glebrionus” falsely informed them that “Boethius” had given up school to
pursue riches as a scribe. Without further comment, “Boethius” offers a seemingly
related tip on how to procure money from unwilling family members if persuasive
speeches fail. Several quotations of the relevant passage in commentaries on De disci­
plina specify that a step-father is the unwilling party. “Boethius's” advice is surpris­
ingly violent: “If the resources cannot be consolidated by the compliance of [the step­
father], he should be disparaged with threats and, by timely dragging, he should be
broken down, just as in the humorous negotiation of Proculus.”32 The use of iocosa
(humorous) after a description of threatening, or perhaps assaulting, a family member
suggests that there might be something funny, perhaps wickedly delightful, about the
fantasy of perpetrating such abuse. Moreover, so close on the heels of “Boethius's”
own monetary problems, Pseudo-Boethius's possible use of vitricus (stepfather) per­
haps suggests the real Boethius's own family situation and his well-known relation­
ship with Symmachus, Boethius's adoptive father and father-in-law. Regarding the
reference to the “negotiation of Proculus,” Weijers offers only that “l'allusion est ob­
scure.”33 Wheteley's commentary on De disciplina, however, clarifies the allusion.
Proculus's story also involves a stepparent. Wheteley relates that, when Proculus's
stepmother refused to provide him money for school, he threatened to burn her “de­
nuded lower parts” (parte inferiori nudata) by forcing her to sit naked on a fire tri-
pod.34 This “humorous” intimidation regarding the scorching of her genitals made her
so pliable that she never let a scholar go needy again. “Boethius” assumes readers will

31 “Parentum detestabilis et adunca tenacitas precum instancia permollitur tediosisque affatibus

plerumque dissuitur, fletibus tempestivis delinitur, promissis fallacibus excecatur et munusculis affectuosis
dissolvitur, adulacione si tempestiva fuerit perforatur, si minus solidatur ...” Ibid. 116.
32 “Obsequio [vitrici] si nequit consolidari facultas, minis derogetur tractuque tempestivo comminuetur,
ut iocosa Proculi transaccio.” Weijers, Pseudo-Boèce (n. 5 above) 117, with “vitrici” substituted for
Weijer's “vitrea.” I follow alternate readings from commentary quotations. The Pseudo-Aquinas commen­
tary has vitrici, “Obsequio vitrici si nequeat consolari facultas ...” Doctoris angelici di'vi Thomae Aquinatis
Opera Omnia, vol. 26, ed. Stanislai Eduardi Frette (Paris 1875) 638.
33 Weijers, Pseudo-Boèce (n. 5 above) 158 n. 4, 27.
34 Johnson, “Critical Edition” (n. 18 above) 658.
170 BROOKE HUNTER

know the reference, but even without recalling this story, “Boethius” is portrayed as a
man who finds the assault of family members humorous and perhaps suggests the tac­
tics he himself wanted to take after his family cut off his stipend. This image of Boe­
thius taking vindictive delight at the thought of burning a lady’s genitals might seem
difficult to square with the revered philosopher of the Consolatio. But within a scho­
lastic grammar school classroom, where misogynist rants and depictions of rape were
commonplace, such a pedagogue Boethius would have seemed very much at home.35
“Boethius” next exemplum offers another suggestively transgressive reading re­
garding Boethius’s family life alongside one of the most incongruous lessons of all, in
that it glosses over the sin of prostitution when the pandering benefits a scholar’s
pocket. “Boethius” counsels young men to let the expenses of a sister’s wedding take
precedence over their schooling, “lest through a careless fault her [the sister’s] first
rose is plucked by an unworthy thumb.”36 The exemplum tells of orphans: a brother
and the sister in his care, Elisa. Wary of the threat of “unworthy thumbs,” the youth
gave all his funds to his sister’s dowry and saw her properly married. Unfortunately,
her husband died and Elisa was returned to her now-destitute brother. By no means an
idle woman, “when [Elisa’s brother] lacked resources, she put forth her most secret
flower. Unknown, she preferred to succumb to a fault of carelessness” rather than to
disrupt her brother’s life.37 This scholar, whose education was funded by his sister’s
prostitution, is named Simacum, or, as Weijers notes, “une forme de Symmachus.”38
Although the exemplum begins by praising chastity, the prostituting of Elisa’s body is
only half-heartedly condemned and is billed as preferable to leaving Symmachus’s
debts unpaid. Wheteley even praises Elisa’s willingness to prostitute herself for her
brother’s benefit—“in this she was commendable” (in hoc fuit conmendabilis)—as
well as her discretion.39 The series of juxtapositions is suggestive: a description of
“the detestable crooked grasping” of “Boethius’s” own “parents,” followed by a justi­
fication of assaulting a family member, perhaps a stepparent, an oblique reference to
fantasized violence against a stepmother’s pudenda, and a shocking exemplum in
which the sister of Symmachus, the name of Boethius’s own adoptive father, is shown
to be a whore with a heart of gold. The overt lesson here seems to be that parents
might need “encouragement” to fund one’s education, but there are times when others’
needs come first. The humor lies, in part, in the picture of a serious auctor brought to
money-grubbing in his school days, in the focus of our attention on the female geni­
tals, and perhaps in taking potshots at Symmachus, all of which allows the reader to
glory with complicit glee in the selfishness and violence he advocates. That is, we take
pleasure in the way the exposition of this lesson overturns and subverts both its pur­
ported goals and the probity of the lesson itself, even as the kernel of that lesson is

35 On the commonplace use of rape narratives in the grammar school classroom, see Marjorie Curry
Woods “Rape and the Pedagogical Rhetoric of Sexual Violence,” Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages,
ed. Rita Copeland (Cambridge 1996) 56-86.
36 . ne per incurie vicium rosa primula pollice carpatur indigno.” Weijers, Pseudo-Boèce (n. 5 above)
117.
37 cum defecit facultas, secrecius florem exponebat. Maluit enim vicio incurie clam subcumbere
quam fraterne fedus constancie se viva disrumpere.” Ibid. (n. 5 above) 118.
38 Ibid. (n. 5 above) 158 n. 4, 29.
39 Johnson, “Critical Edition” (n. 18 above) 665.
BOETHIAN HUMOR AND THE PSEUDO-BOETHIAN DE DISCIPLINA SCOLARIUM 171

also conveyed. Moreover, the very perception of humor here necessitates a type of
interpretive work—connecting together parts of the narratives, comparing this “Boe­
thius” and his life to other visions of the auctor, recognizing the negative implications
of advocating violence generally—that moves against the grain of “Boethius’s” more
upright lessons.
“Boethius’s” violent sexual jests and his digs at foolish masters share subject mat­
ter and tone with other works from the same time period that revel in placing respected
men in humorous and compromising situations. Henri d’Andeli’s La Bataille des VII
Ars, written sometime before 1236; tells of a fantastic battle between Dame Grammar
and Dame Logic, in which Sir Boethius fights for Logic alongside Sir Macrobius in an
allegorical skirmish. These philosopher knights ride to the aid of Aristotle: “The books
of nature, Ethics, /Madame Necromancy, Medicine, / And Sir Boethius and Sir Mac­
robius / Dressed in caitiff garb, / And Porphyry, came on a run.”40 In a ridiculous tab­
leau, Boethius and Macrobius, apparently dressed in rags (a dig at Philosophy’s fa­
mously tattered gown?), charge beside Aristotelian translations, the personification of
black magic, and the arts of bodily health.41 The satire here focuses primarily on an
excessive zeal for logic, but the auctores who represent this zeal also come away
looking ridiculous. The most striking examples of revered auctores humorously
knocked from their pedestals come in the stories, composed around the same period as
De disciplina, of Aristotle, Virgil, and Ovid as foolish lovers. The most famous of
these stories is of Aristotle’s pony-play dalliance with Phyllis, Alexander’s mistress
who made a ridiculous spectacle of the revered philosopher by saddling him up with a
bit and bridle and riding him like a horse before she would grant him her favors.42 The
account of Virgil’s humiliating day, which he spent suspended in a basket for all to see
when he tried to sneak in for a tryst with a lady in a tower, has the same effect.43 The
Pseudo-Ovidian De vetula has Ovid tell of his befuddled sexual escapades. Such sto­
ries show a mischievous delight in bringing cerebral heroes down to the level of
fabliau bawds, and suggest that revered auctores were not off limits for light-hearted
lampooning. Such depictions revel in the fallibility of intellectuals and foreground
their participation in the foibles of embodiment instead of venerating the products of
their minds. They are also, simultaneously, a sign of the auctoritas of the author who
is the butt of the jest.
Like Virgil, Ovid, and Aristotle, Boethius is also the subject of a raunchy story in
Maximianus’s Elegies, a text that provides a touchstone for understanding both De
disciplinais humor and why its “Boethius” might not have seemed unusual to a medi­
eval reader. Although Elegies, written by a contemporary of Boethius, is a considera­
bly earlier work than the stories mentioned above, like De disciplina it was commonly

40 Two Medieval Satires on the University o f Paris: La Bataille des VII Ars o f Henri d ’Andeli, and the
Morale Scolarium o f John o f Garland, ed. and trans. Louis John Paetow (Berkeley 1927) 50-51.
41 It is interesting to note that one of Theodoric’s charges against Boethius was the use of magic.
42 George Sarton, “Aristotle and Phyllis,” Isis 11.1 (1930) 8-19.
43 The tradition of Virgil stories has been explored in The Virgilian Tradition the First Fifteen Hundred
Years, ed. Jan Ziolkowski and Michael C. J. Putnam (New Haven 2008). For example, the sequel to the
Virgil in a Basket story, sometimes called Virgil the Necromancer, tells of Virgil’s revenge on his erstwhile
lover and the people who laughed at him by making that lady’s vagina the only source of fire in the city. In
another tale Virgil transforms himself into a horse for his lady’s pleasure.
172 BROOKE HUNTER

read as a grammar school text. Elegies deals primarily with the problems of old age,
particularly the difficult combination of impotence and an undiminished desire for
young girls, what Chaucer’s Reeve calls “a hoor heed and a grene tayl.”44 Like De
disciplines “Boethius,” Maximianus’s Boethius, who tries to facilitate the fornication
of a young friend, has often been considered an outlier among depictions of the auc­
tor. As Gerard O’Daley puts it, “Boethian scholars have, for the most part, refused to
believe that the sober and pious persona evoked in the Consolatio is identical with the
sexual adventurer of these verses.”45 Whether or not Maximianus’s raunchy Boethius
accurately depicts the auctor’s real-life bawdiness, however, is little relevant to medi­
eval readers who read the Elegies as Maximianus’s true life writing. Although such
erotic fare might not seem full of high morality, Maximianus’s poems were catego­
rized by accessus as ethical in nature, “The usefulness of this book is the recognition
of foolish desires, that is, avoiding old age. It may be placed under the category of
ethics, since it discusses behavior.”46
In the Elegies, as in De disciplina, Boethius also presents humorously suspect
moral lessons that are played for laughs. Reminiscing on his youthful sexual esca­
pades, Maximianus depicts Boethius as a wise counselor providing advice to the youth
when his lust for the beautiful Aquilina was stymied by her protective parents. Per­
ceiving the boy’s malaise, Boethius attempts to diagnose the problem in language
reminiscent of Philosophy’s nursing at the beginning of the Consolatio. When the boy
shamefully admits his lust, Boethius,

Dissolved in laughter, he shouted: “What stiff resistance!

Tell me when Venus’s love was ever chaste?
Cease to have pity on her the boys all love.
Here you will sin if you wish to be so sinless.
Loves are nourished by tender bites and scratches,
Something adapted to blows does not flee from wounds.47

Boethius goes on to play the role of panderer for the boy by buying off the girl’s par­
ents so they will allow Aquilina to meet with her lover. When faced with the real pos­
sibility of enjoying his crush, the youth becomes disgusted with the sex act, loses his
desire, and thereby preserves his virginity. A proud Boethius then explains that this
was his plan all along:

“Hail, holy virginity, always abide intact;

Because of me you’ll be completely chaste.”
After the news was brought to that great man
He saw I had escaped from passion’s waves.

44 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Reeve's Prologue, The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. Larry D. Benson (Bos­
ton 1987), at line 3877. For Maximianus’s influence on Chaucer see George L. Kittredge, “Chaucer and
Maximianus,” American Journal o f Philology 9.1 (1888) 84-85; G. R. Coffman, “Old Age from Horace to
Chaucer,” Speculum 9.3 (1934) 249-277; J. Allan Mitchell, “Boethius and Pandarus: A Source in Maxi-
mian’s Elegies,” Notes and Queries 50.4 (Dec. 2003) 377-380.
45 Gerard O’Daley, The Poetry o f Boethius (Chapel Hill 1991) 10.
46 “... utilitas libri est cognitio stulti desiderii, senectutis euitatio. [E]thice subponitur quia de moribus
tractat.” R. B. C. Huygens, Accessus ad auctores (Berchem-Bruxelles 1954) 20.
47 Gabriele Zerbi, “Gerontocomia: On the Care o f the Aged"; and Maximianus, “Elegies on Old Age
and Love. " ed. and trans. L. R. Lind (Philadelphia 1988) III.65-70.
BOETHIAN HUMOR AND THE PSEUDO-BOETHIAN DE DISCIPLINA SCOLARIUM 173

“Flourish,” he said, “young man, you’ve mastered your love;

take up the trophies of war from those you’ve defeated.
Let the weapons of Venus, the bow of Cupid, yield,
And let Minerva, mighty in warfare, yield.”
The power to sin thus permitted removed my desire
To sin, and the very wish to do so was gone.
Sullen, displeased, we parted from one another;
The reason for parting: a chaste and virtuous life.48

The third Elegy rounds out what could have been a sinful tale with a suspect moral
lesson provided by Boethius. Here again, we see the double-hermeneutic at play: the
way to preserve one’s virginity, so we are told, is to create the opportunity to have sex.
The idea that one can avoid sin by removing its prohibition seems a ridiculously dan­
gerous lesson. Moreover, removing the prohibition did not keep Maximianus celibate,
as the rest of Elegies shows in piquant erotic detail; Boethius’s “cure” was a fleeting
flop. S. J. B. Barnish asserts that the “whole story remains morally unresolved, the
poet’s verdict ambiguous. Boethius seems neither butt nor hero, but a figure deliber­
ately introduced to perplex us.”49 However perplexing Maximianus’s original inten­
tion remains, his portrayal of Boethius resembles the thirteenth-century treatment of
other respected auctores like Aristotle, Virgil, and Ovid and resonates with the moral
ambiguity of De disciplinais similarly off-kilter lessons, producing a complicated vi­
sion of the medieval Boethius and his auctoritas that was an important part of the me­
dieval Boethian corpus.
Boethius not only appears as a character in Maximianus’s Elegies, the structure,
language, and themes of Elegies consistently echo the Consolatio in a way that fore­
grounds suggestive interpretations while adding to the intellectual richness of the
work, and its humor.50 The failure of Boethius to provide a lasting solution to his
young friend’s erotic desire certainly seems to suggest that Maximianus did not think
highly of the powers of his consolations. The beautiful Greek girl of the fifth of the
Elegies, who stands in Maximianus’s room singing improvised songs with a modest
face and sparkling eyes, is reminiscent of both the Consolatio’s Philosophy and the
siren Muses of Poetry.51 Like Philosophy, this Graia also sings a hymn to universal
forces (cf. Consolatio 3M9); hers is to the mentula, the cock, whose pleasures she cel­
ebrates alongside its power to create life and to bind together the sexes. This power,
however, is sadly lacking in Maximianus, who is unable to sustain an erection even

48 Ibid. III. 83—94.

49 S. J. B. Barnish, “Maximian, Cassiodorus, Boethius, Theodahad: Literature, Philosophy and Politics
in Ostrogothic Italy,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 34 (1990) 16-32, at 25 n. 40. The martial language
describing the youth’s impotent defeat of Venus is echoed by another contemporary of Boethius, the bishop
Magnus Felix Ennodius (d. 521). In philosophical language he addresses Boethius’s ability to render male
“weapons” flaccid. “In your hands the substance of a rigid sword wilts, / Even steel dissolves like flowing
water. / The unwarlike right hand of Boethius renders swords soft. / What was recently a weapon is now,
believe me, a spindle. / Outstanding in Venery, leave the tools of Mars.” Cited from Danuta Shanzer, “En­
nodius, Boethius, and the Date and Interpretation of Maximianus’s Elegia III,” Rivista di Filologia e di
Instruzione Classica 111 (1983) 183-195.
50 For a summation of these echoes see Barnish, “Maximian, Cassiodorus, Boethius” (n. 49 above) 22­
28. See also Joel C. Relihan, The Prisoner’s Philosophy: Life and Death in Boethius’s Consolation (Notre
Dame 2007) esp. 101-107 and 147-153.
51 C.f. V.6-16 and Consolatio, 1P1-8.
174 BROOKE HUNTER

with her eager ministrations. Considering how we are to understand these echoes,
Barnish voices an idea of parody similar to Hutcheon’s: that “intelligent parody is not
a symptom of contempt,” certainly, at least, it is not by necessity contemptuous.52 He
argues that Elegies rewrite the Consolatio, not to dismiss that work, but to engage with
it in a way that “greatly enrich[es] our enjoyment [of Elegies] to see how comic and
ironic parody joins with serious thoughts and reservations on Boethius’ ideas of love
and providence.”53 As I argued above, imitations and creative alterations need not
devalue or debase the original text they rework, even if humorous. Maximianus’s Ele­
gies and De disciplina both replay aspects of the Consolation s Boethius in precisely
this way, thereby building a complicated vision of Boethius’s voice and personality
that mixes serious didacticism with ironic comedy.
Although it is a scholarly commonplace to register surprise at the use of Maximi­
anus in the schools because of the Elegies’ erotic content, in fact, it is precisely the
work’s erotic content that marks it as appropriate for a grammar school classroom.54
Like De disciplina, Elegies was used as a grammar school teaching text. Maximianus
was collected as part of the Liber Catonianus, also known as the Sex Auctores, a
standard grammar school reader used after Donatus.55 Following the completion of
song school, grammar school training began at around seven years of age and ran until
around fourteen to seventeen, after which a boy could continue his studies at univer­
sity. The ubiquitous assertions of shock from modern scholars commenting on the use
of such explicitly erotic material by children, however, are anachronistic reactions
whose prudishness is not reflected in the curriculum lists or commentaries from medi­
eval schools.56 As Marjorie Curry Woods has argued, the eroticism, violence, and vio­
lent eroticism (rape), offered in grammar school texts provide “a cornucopia of ado­
lescent male fantasies,” and were used pedagogically for both Latin literacy acqui­
sition and composition training.57 For Woods, “one of the most distinctive and, to a
modern reader, unexpected aspects of word play in the texts used to teach style and
composition to young students during the Middle Ages is the intense figuration and
sexual suggestiveness of the language.”58 The puritanism of modern scholars has also

52 Barnish, “Maximian, Cassiodorus, Boethius” (n. 49 above) 27.

53 Ibid.
54 Cf. Nicholas Orme, Medieval Schools: From Roman Britain to Renaissance England (New Haven
2006) 97, who calls it “hardly appropriate for classroom reading.” Tony Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin
in 13th-Century England (Cambridge 1991) 70, muses that is “not an obvious choice as a school text for
beginners.” Joseph Szôvérffy, “Maximianus as Satirist?,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 72 (1968)
351-367, at 366, notes that Maximianus’s nominal Christianity “does not make his writing suitable for the
schools.”
55 The Liber Catonianus included Disticha Catonis, Ecologue of Theodulus, the Fables of Avianus,
Maximianus’s Elegies, the Achilleid of Statius, and the Rape of Proserpine. See Marjorie Curry Woods,
“The Teaching of Poetic Composition in the Later Middle Ages,” A Short History o f Writing Instruction
From Ancient Greece to Modern America, 2nd ed., ed. James J. Murphy (Hillsdale 2001) 123-143, esp.
124-126. Nicholas Orme in English Schools in the Middle Ages (London 1973) 103, notes that while the
Sex Auctores was widely read in the 13th c., “by 1300 changing tastes in Western Europe were leading to
the disuse of the pagan poets and the formation of a new group of texts for use in the school,” the so-called
Auctores Octo, in which Maximianus was being replaced by the still-lascivious Remedia amoris of Ovid,
103.
56 Szôvérffy, “Maximianus as Satirist?” (n. 54 above) 366.
57 Woods “The Teaching of Poetic Composition” (n. 55 above) 128.
58 Ibid. 127.
BOETHIAN HUMOR AND THE PSEUDO-BOETHIAN DE DISCIPLINA SCOLARIUM 175

been trounced as anachronistic by Ralph Hexter: “there was not the antipathy to eros
with which contemporary imagination credits [the monastery and cathedral schools],
nor even the squeamishness many nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars have
shown or have felt compelled to show when dealing with certain aspects of the clas-
sics.”59 Moreover, such texts were not just considered unproblematic for young boys,
they were considered more appropriate for boys than for adults. As Woods, again,
notes, “the straightforward treatment in the medieval schoolroom of what we consider
to be particularly sensitive (or insensitive) subjects is less surprising when we re­
member that there was an established medieval tradition of letting boys read texts that
were considered problematic for adults.”60 A guide to the ideal grammar school
curriculum written around 1200 in France or England makes this idea clearer when it
recommends that in the Sex Auctores the school boy would find “a useful compendium
of morality” where he could “learn about the vices to avoid in the age of minority”
even as it goes on to suggest that the Liber Catonianus would not be appropriate for
older students.61 John of Salisbury similarly accedes that “games in the gymnasium of
philosophy” are acceptable for gaining Latin proficiency, but he also recommends that
“facetious folly, noisy [volubility], empty loquacity, and puerile silliness, should all be
set aside, as soon as the first soft beard begins to appear on one’s face.”62 In telling
older boys to forego puerile silliness, we are also clued in to what to expect will be
indulged with younger students, even as the prohibition suggests that older boys were
not always willing to leave behind their fun. Wheteley’s commentary on De disciplina
also supports the pedagogical necessity of fun and play, going so far as to place a
boy’s need for play on par with his need for food.63 Boys, we might surmise, will gig­
gle at erotic scenes that older students may be tempted to reenact.
This is not to say that the use of erotic materials in the schoolroom was met entirely
without opposition. Alexander Villadieux denounced the use of Maximianus as a
school text in the opening to his Doctrinale puerorum (ca. 1200), which he says he
wrote in order to replace Maximianus with something more wholesome: “I plan to
write the Doctrinale for young little clerks / I will unite many of my teachings in the
writing / For now the boys read the trifles of Maximianus / which old fellows should
not wish to spread before dear ones.”64 The Doctrinale was widely used, but it did not
oust Maximianus’s Elegies from the curriculum entirely. As late as 1358 the work of
Maximianus was listed in the will of an Almonry schoolmaster at St. Paul’s London
who bequeathed eighty-four volumes and a variety of other school-related materials to

59 Ralph J. Hexter, Ovid and Medieval Schooling. Studies in Medieval School Commentaries on Ovid's
Ars Amatoria, Expistulae ex Ponto, and Epistulae Herodium (Müchen 1986) 25.
60 Woods, “Rape and the Pedagogical Rhetoric” (n. 35 above) 66.
61 Orme, Medieval Schools (n. 54 above) 97.
62John of Salisbury, The Metalogicon of John of Salisbury: A Twelfth-Century Defense of the Verbal
and Logical Arts o f the Trivium, trans. Daniel D. McGarry (Gloucester 1971) 245.
63 Sebastian, “William of Wheteley’s Commentary” (n. 8 above) 161. On the perceived need for recrea­
tional enjoyment and breaks from studying for the young, see Glendig Olson, “The Recreational Justifica­
tion,” Literature as Recreational Enjoyment (Ithaca 1982) 90-127, esp. 116-119.
64 “Scribere clericulis paro Doctrinale novellis / pluraque doctorum sociabo scripta meorum. / iamque
legent pueri pro nugis Maximiani / quae veteres sociis nolebant pandere caris.” Cited in The Elegies o f
Maximianus ed. Richard Webster (Princeton 1900) 10.
176 BROOKE HUNTER

the school and its boys.65 The Almonry will gives a peek into the library of a
fourteenth-century grammar school; De disciplina is also listed in the will, the Con­
solatio is not. So far, we have seen that De disciplina occupied a prominent place in
the medieval Boethian corpus and provided a vision of the auctor as funny, raunchy,
and morally ambiguous, a portrayal shared with the Boethius of Maximianus’s Ele­
gies, and indeed other, less-scholarly, humorous portrayals of auctores. The humor of
these texts springs primarily from the puerile titillation of sexual topics, violence, and
irreverence, all pedagogical tools deemed appropriate for young schoolboys. In the
next section, I look at the ways in which such teaching texts acknowledge the double
hermeneutic they offer, suggesting that these works knowingly model a transgressive
interpretive education alongside their more traditional moralitas.

II. Hu m o r a s Pe d a g o g y
The lessons provided by De disciplina mix didacticism with humor, showcasing the
vices and ignorance of scholarly figures, many of whom are unveiled as fraudulent
intellectuals. But these humorous moments do more than elicit laughs, spark interest,
and stick in the mind; they also offer a secondary interpretive education through the
perception of their humor. The very process by which these works are found funny
moves beyond simple slapstick, but rather requires the hermeneutic acts of noticing
suggestion, irony, and irreverence in otherwise serious texts. Other teaching texts that
make use of humor, such as Petrus Alfonsi’s similarly titled Disciplina clericalis
(early twelfth century), Geoffrey of Vinsaunf’s Poetria Nova (ca. 1210), and Maximi­
anus’s Elegies can help us understand how De disciplina’s humor functions pedagogi­
cally. The simultaneity of these serio-comic works’ didacticism and irreverent humor
by necessity entails a form of interpretive ambiguity and openness. Edward Wheatley
has noted a similar intermingling of seriousness and play in the interpretation of fa­
bles, hinting at “the possibility of rich multilayered reading of fable that might strike
the modern readers as odd, inconsistent, and poorly organized” but that ultimately
allows for a “remarkably expansive” interpretive horizon.66 That is, these school texts
teach and reward multiple ways of reading, a double-hermeneutic that presents and
undercuts one and the same lesson as part of their fun, and as part of the pleasure of
their pedagogy.
Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria nova (ca. 1210), a popular grammar schoolbook on
poetic composition written shortly before De disciplina, recognizes this double-her­
meneutic at work in the text in a winking aside to his readers. Geoffrey’s work uses
the same sort of silliness that we have already seen, for example, he illustrates rhetori­
cal tropes with head-to-toe descriptions of naked women, and pairs pious laments of

65 Edith Rickert, “Chaucer at School,” Modern Philology 29.3 (1932) 257-274.

66 Edward Wheatley, Mastering Aesop: Medieval Education, Chaucer, and His Followers (Gainsville
2000) 95. See also 91-96, at 94, where Wheatley notes the ludic dimension of fable interpretation, “one
kind of play leads to another, as the playfulness of the genre of fable leads to the allegorical freedom of
various interpretations. ... The carnivalesque inversion of power in the buffeting plays is duplicated in the
schoolboy’s threat to break the bones of his master, a threat that both mimics and mocks the physical vio­
lence that informs many fables.”
BOETHIAN HUMOR AND THE PSEUDO-BOETHIAN DE DISCIPLINA SCOLARIUM 177

the cross with laments of threadbare tablecloths to humorous effect.67 Geoffrey begins
the Poetria Nova with an ultimately reverent, but humorously subversive, metrical
joke “decapitating” the Pope’s name, a witticism similar to Master Iocarius’s metrical
commentary on the word magister. Woods and others have noted that such works are
often not only humorous, but transgressively so, their inverted power dynamics, vul­
garity, and violence designed to appeal to youthful fantasies. The image of beheading
the pope or paralleling the cross with a dirty tablecloth, are meant to be light-hearted
jests even as they would be highly inappropriate in another context. Most interest­
ingly, Geoffrey overtly encourages readers to enjoy the transgressive subtext of his
work as he also performs a disavowal of that encouragement. When discussing apos­
trophe, Geoffrey offers the carnivalesque composition theme, “Boys are raised up and
made masters.” After exemplifying such a composition on a pseudo-intellectual, Geof­
frey addresses his reader as if in a hushed aside: “you can laugh at the absurd situa­
tion; it is indeed a ridiculous thing: By his own and by popular verdict this is a learned
man. But you perceive the same thing I do: he is a very ape among scholars. I said that
in a whisper, let no one hear it aloud.”68 Geoffrey’s faux-whisper acknowledges the
funny, ironic, and subversive undertones of a text that states one thing (“this is a
learned man”) even as he authorizes readers to interpret otherwise (“he is a very ape
among scholars”). Moreover, he also notes that acknowledging the perception of such
humor might not always be appropriate. He uses his authority to validate, or indeed to
teach, this way of reading (“you perceive the same thing I do”) even as he silences the
expression of his underhanded lesson (“let no one hear it aloud”). This simultaneous
expression and disavowal gives license to creative and subversive ways of thinking
about authority and the playful interpretation of language in school texts, and is the
same sort of implicit humor at work in De disciplina.
De disciplina also seems to owe much to Petrus Alfonsi’s, similarly titled, early
twelfth-century Disciplina clericalis, particularly in the way it humorously presents
good advice through the medium of ironic exempla. Alfonsi’s work is well known, but
I have found only one source that links it to De disciplina. John Tolan, in Petrus Al­
fonsi and His Medieval Readers, suggests that “the title of the most popular thirteenth-
century handbook for students is inspired by that of Alfonsi’s work: it is the De disci­
plina scholarium. ”69 De disciplina clearly shares more with Disciplina clericalis than
titular inspiration; rather, it also seems indebted to Alfonsi for the serio-comic irony of
its moralized exempla. Ostensibly didactic, Disciplina clericalis collects outright
fabliaux alongside its more sober fables, proverbs, and exempla in the loose frame
narrative of a father/philosopher giving advice to his son. Like fatherly, advice-giving
“Boethius” of De disciplina, Alfonsi’s text seems intended for students of early or
intermediate Latin training.70 Alfonsi’s explanation of how his text uses humor can67890

67 Marjorie Curry Woods, Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria nova across Medieval and
Renaissance Europe (Columbus 2010) 7-8.
68 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria Nova o f Geoffrey o f Vinsauf, trans. Margaret F. Nims (Toronto 1967)
32. Italics in original.
69 John Tolan, Petrus Alfonsi and His Medieval Readers (Gainsville 1993) 138.
70 Gillian Adams, “The Urban(e) Tales of Petrus Alfonsi,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly
23.1 (1998) 7-12.
178 BROOKE HUNTER

help us further clarify how the humor of De disciplina works. Alfonsi addresses the
necessary “softness” of his work to justify his use of amusement:

The temperament of mankind is delicate; it must be instructed by being led, as it were, little
by little, so that it will not become bored. I am mindful also of its resistance, which must to
some extent be softened and sweetened, so that it may retain what it has learned with greater
facility. ... I have taken pains to see that my writing may offer the readers and listeners a
stimulus and an occasion to learn.71

His stories offer, if not lessons, then at least “occasions to learn”; crafted to be easily
retained by the memory, they also lead the pupil little by little, wearing their didacti­
cism so lightly that the pedagogical effects are only perceptible with accretion. De
disciplines “Boethius” similarly twice claims to be using a lighter style than his pre­
vious works because of the “rough minds” he means to address.72
Some of the stories in Disciplina clericalis offer their lessons clearly, such as the
advice to keep good company shown in the tale of a priest who drinks at a public
house against his companion's advice and is mistaken for a criminal. The stories from
the section on “evil women” are outright fabliaux, including the “Tale of the Weeping
Bitch.” Many tales fall somewhere in between, such as the story of a man who at­
tempted to identify his true friends by chopping up a calf, throwing it in a bloody bag,
and carrying it to the houses of his friends claiming that it was the body of a man he
had killed. The “bad” friends are those who refuse to help him hide the body of his
supposedly dismembered victim. Similarly ambiguous is the story of a poet whom a
king rewards with the ability to enforce a one-denarius tax on hunchbacks, the one­
eyed, and those with impetigo, hernias, or “the itch.” Having been refused one dena­
rius by a man with a hunchback, the poet scuffles with and denudes the poor soul to
discover that he also carries all of the other taxable afflictions. The confrontation ends
with the pitiable one-eyed hunchback with skin problems and a hernia paying the poet
five denarii instead of one. The lesson, we are told, is not to wait to get out of trouble
that can be easily overcome at present lest more troubles amass during the delay. But
one wonders whether this lesson would be apparent without the explanation. (Might
we also think of De disciplina’s similarly afflicted, bandy-legged, leprous eunuch
hunchback son of Timothy here?) Pretending to be a murderer to test one's friends or
gouging the sick and afflicted for money are humorously questionable actions used in
order to teach otherwise upright lessons: that true friends are rare and that putting off
necessary unpleasantries is unwise. It is telling of critical confusion regarding how to
read these works, however, that the humor of Disciplina clericalis has also caused
debate. Many critics seem reluctant to accept the simultaneity of the serious and the

71 The Scholar’s Guide: A Translation o f the Twelfth-Century Disciplina clericalis o f Pedro Alfonso, ed.
and trans. Joseph Ramon Jones and John Esten Keller (Toronto 1969) 34.
72 “In general ceasing my former manner of writing, never having used a lighter touch with my pen, in
large part because the discussion is meant for shaping the rough mind, the accomplishment of this
explanation ought to be that much lighter.” Pristinum modum tractandi fere omittentes, nusquam leviori
stilo perusi, quoniam in maiori parte rudibus informandis est exsecucio et tanto dilucidandi levior
transaccio. Weijers, Pseudo-Boèce (n. 5 above) 94.
BOETHIAN HUMOR AND THE PSEUDO-BOETHIAN DE DISCIPLINA SCOLARIUM 179

comedic.73 Part of what makes Alfonsi’s text fun, however, is precisely the discrep­
ancy between the delightful subversion of the specific examples and the irreproachable
lessons they convey, a double-hermeneutic we have already seen in De disciplina,
Geoffrey of Vinsauf, and Maximianus.74
De disciplina, Disciplina clericalis, and Maximianus’s Elegies show us that humor
need not be opposed to or negate a didactic agenda, even if that humor is grounded in
subversion or a playful spoofing of authority. Conversely, however, we should not
downplay the subversive potential of such texts or even the lasting power of their fig­
urations of Boethius on later writers influenced by him.75 These works make use of
traditional forms of authority while leading readers to think beyond the confines of the
authoritatively stated interpretation. I will end by noting that even the historical Boe­
thius was not completely without an eye for the humor of humanity. While discussing
the philosophical concept of “property,” that which is shared by all individuals of the
same species, in his commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge, Boethius—the real Boe­
thius—names the ability to laugh as a property of humanity: “for though he does not
always laugh, yet he is said to be risible, not from his always laughing, but from being
naturally adapted to laugh, and this is always inherent in him.”76 Boethius’s choice of
humanity’s humor for his example is striking since the notion of Boethian humor, or
even a humorous Boethius, is not one that sits easily with our general conception of
the philosopher best known for his disparagement of earthly life’s most normative
longings. Boethius, as a human being, does not always laugh, and yet we can say he is
risible and that humor is inherent to him. The vision of a wisecracking, sexual, and
ambiguously moral “Boethius” presented in De disciplina and Maximianus was very
much part of who the auctor was to the medieval reader, and the neglect of these texts
does a disservice to the capacious and complicated medieval imagining of Boethius
and auctoritas more generally.

73 Tolan acknowledges the humor of Alfonsi’s work but not its subversiveness; see Petrus Alfonsi (n. 69
above) 81. Jones and Keller see in Alfonsi a “mock-serious didiacticism” related to the Arab concept of
adab, which they say allowed the learned to enjoy vulgar and silly tales lacking in morals if they were
disguised with didactic claims. They write, “humor in these tales lay even in the very claim to didacticism:
the humor was definitely intentional and was, some believe, the particular genius of this particular inversion
of the most venerated aims of art”; Scholar’s Guide (n. 71 above) 18.
74Disciplina clericalis has also been called “the first European frame narrative of importance” a formal
structure that would go on to inspire Boccaccio and Chaucer, among others, and that seems to encourage a
mix of the serious and the comedic; see Katharine Slater Gittes, “The Canterbury Tales and the Arabic
Frame Tradition,” PMLA 98.2 (1983) 237-251, at 244.
75 I consider the influence of this humorous Boethius on later authors in the larger project from which
this article is drawn.
76 The Organon, or Logical Treatises o f Aristotle with the Introduction o f Porphyry, vol. 2, trans.
Octavius Freire Owen (London 1853) 623.