Chaucer's Translation of Boethius's "De Consolatione Philosophiae" · Boethius
Chapter 1
Produced by Louise Hope, David Starner, JackMcJiggins and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net [This e-text includes characters that require UTF-8 (Unicode) file encoding: œ (“oe” ligature) ȝ Ȝ (yogh) ħ ũ (h with bar, u with tilde: both rare) The Sidenotes include a few Greek phrases: ἕπου Θεῷ If any of these characters do not display properly, or if the apostrophes and quotation marks in this paragraph appear as garbage, make sure your text reader’s “character set” or “file encoding” is set to Unicode (UTF-8). You may also need to change the default font. As a last resort, use the Latin-1 version of the file instead. Linenotes refer to the Cambridge MS.; see end of Introduction. “H.” in the Linenotes is not explained; Skeat’s edition of Chaucer’s _Complete Works_ says that it refers to MS. Harley 2421. _Text format:_ In the printed book, line numbers were squeezed in wherever there was room. For the e-text, they have been regularized to the EETS-standard multiples of 4. Line divisions and page numbers were retained for use with the Index and linenotes, except that some very short words have been moved up or down to avoid awkward gaps. Headnotes have been moved to the nearest convenient line break. Italics representing expanded abbreviations are shown in b{ra}ces. Other italics are shown conventionally with _lines_. Superscripts are shown with ^ (caret); they always continue to the end of the word. Oversized initial letters are shown with double leading ++ as ++A. In the Appendix, decorative final letters are shown with single + as dar+, sprong+. Italic thorn (þ) and yogh (ȝ) seem to have been unavailable to the printer; both letters have been formatted to match the surrounding text.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.