It is because forgetfulness of thyself hath bewildered thy mind that thou hast bewailed thee as an exile, as one stripped of the blessings that were his it is because thou knowest not the end of existence that thou deemest abominable and wicked men to be happy and powerful while, because thou hast forgotten by what means the earth is governed, thou deemest that fortune's changes ebb and flow without the restraint of a guiding hand. She determines that the narrator has forgotten his true nature: As the narrator writes his complaint against Fortune, a woman appears whom the author later identifies as Philosophy. Indeed, Machaut’s “remedy for Fortune” can be seen as an response to Boethius’s text: where Philosophy argues that the life of the mind is more important than the external gifts of Fortune, Machaut gives Hope as the lover’s remedy against the whims of Fortune.īoethius’s first-person narrator, like Boethius himself, is in prison, about to be executed for treason. The idea of a narrative with interpolated songs has deep roots, going back to Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, which mixes prose and metrical verse. Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and Machaut’s Remede de Fortune
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