The Editio Princeps of the Old English Boethius, ed. by C. Rawlinson (1698)
Christopher Rawlinson, An. Manl. Sever. Boethi Consolationis Philosophiae libri V. Anglo-Saxonice redditi ab Alfredo, inclyto Anglo-Saxonum Rege (Oxford: Sheldonian Theatre, 1698).
This is the editio princeps of the Old English translation of Boethius's De consolatione philosophiae, which has traditionally been ascribed to the court of King Alfred the Great (reigned 871-899). Christopher Rawlinson (1677-1733), English antiquary, published it in 1698, with assistance from Edward Thwaites, Rawlinson's tutor and a fellow of Queen's College, Oxford, who probably wrote the preface to this volume (Greenfield and Robinson, p. 315). This seems to be the only book Rawlinson published.
Rawlinson's text is based on a transcript made by Francis Junius the Younger (1591-1677), a German pioneer of Germanic philology (the transcript by Junius is preserved at the Bodleian Library, under the shelf mark, MS Junius 12), and it is printed with the Junian font, a font used by Junius.
Junius's portrait is included at the very beginning of the book, while a scene of Boethius talking to Philosophy in a prison cell and a portrait of King Alfred are printed on the first page of the main body of the text. The volume includes both prose and verse versions of the Old English Boethius.
The standard edition of the work is now M. Godden and S. Irvine, eds., The Old English Boethius: An Edition of the Old English Versions of Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophiae, 2 vols. (Oxford, OUP, 2009). The same editors have also published The Old English Boethius with Verse Prologues and Epilogues Associated with King Alfred, DOML 19 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). For other editions, see S. B. Greenfield and F. C. Robinson, A Bibliography of Publications on Old English Literature to the end of 1972 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), pp. 314-15.
