Le prologue de Pierre de Paris à la traduction du De Consolatione Philosophiae de Boèce

Abstract

Pierre de Paris is the author of a prose translation of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae accompanied by a commentary, and written before 1309. The only existing manuscript containing this text is the codex Vat. Lat. 4788 of the Vatican Library, written in the Outremer scripta of the Latin Kingdoms of the East. The article provides some preliminary information about the manuscript and the author, and then focuses on the philosophical problems of the first part of Pierre de Paris’s prologue, written in the form of a dedicatory epistle. This text contains a short philosophical treatise on time and creation. In order to highlight the milieu in which Pierre de Paris should have worked, some details about the cultural and philosophical context of his period are given, followed by a comparison between the prologue’s key features and the theological and exegetic sources to which the translator could have referred to (i.e. St. Augustine, Thomas of Aquin, the Latin commentary tradition of the De Consolatione, or the contemporary works by Ramón Llull). The last section focuses on the thematic and philosophical motifs of the prologue taken up in the commentary to the great Timaean hymn O qui perpetua (Book III, m. IX). The essay shows that Pierre de Paris probably tries to reshape heterogeneous sources, as well as to make an attempt to reconcile Platonism with Christianity, by using Aristotle’s authority.