Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy: A Critical Guide, ed. Michael Wiitala. Cambridge Critical Guides. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024, xi, 254.

No medievalist or early modernist can afford to ignore the vast and deep influence exerted by Boethius, especially with his Consolatio Philosophiae, probably completed in 524 (here, the argument is that it was done in ca. 523). The text has triggered countless responses both by philosophers and poets throughout time. This Cambridge Critical Guide competently edited by Michael Wiitala, provides a good selection of new critical studies addressing a variety of perspectives, probing previous scholarship, and arguing for specific and fairly new interpretations that are all solidly based and clearly developed. The volume consists, apart from the introduction in which Wiitala summarizes the essential findings by the individual contributors, of thirteen articles, all in English, although some of the authors originate from and teach in Germany and Italy. At the beginning, there is a list of contributors and of abbreviations of Boethius’s work, and at the end we find a comprehensive bibliography and an index. In the footnotes, printed in a much too small font, the references are listed by last name and year, which requires a bit of leafing through the book.