Into the Embodied inneweard mod of the Old English Boethius

Abstract

In his translation of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae, Alfred imposes corporeal metaphors to describe the inner mind, constructing an embodied consciousness that contradicts the mind–body dualism of his source text. This article argues that Alfred’s Old EnglishBoethius rehabilitates mind–body dualism to the harmony that is promised by Boethian philosophy. I combine theory of mind with philology to read the OEBoethius comparatively alongside its Latin source text. First, I identify Alfred’s metaphorical descriptions of the inner mind as an embodied consciousness, in accordance with modern cognitive theory. Then, analyzing Alfred’s use of the in lexeme, I argue that Old English in denotes motion into an enclosure. Alfred’s depiction of an embodied consciousness subverts dualism by locating the inner mind within a dialectical process that harmonizes the mind with the body. The purpose of this article is to consider one of the ways in which Alfred contributes to Boethian philosophy, and to incite further scholarship of the Old English encoding of spatial concepts and Anglo-Saxon folk psychology.