'And who will be the readership for this Companion?', asked one of my contributors. 'Not, I imagine, the philosophers, as for the Ockham and Scotus companions,' he went on. 'No, it will be people interested in medieval literature. But of course they will just skip the chapters on logic and theology and move straight to the Consolation', he concluded, sadly - his own chapter was one of those on logic. I take a more sanguine view and think that philosophers, or at least those interested in antiquity and the Middle Ages, will be among our readers, but the chapters they want to read will be exactly those the literature specialists skip. So it will be as if this were two books bound in the same covers, about two Boethiuses who just happen to have been the same person. But that, as I shall explain, would be a great pity. This introduction is a plea to read this Companion, but more important, to read Boethius, whole.

Boethius is not usually read whole for two main reasons. The first, to which I shall return briefly at the end, has nothing in especial to do with Boethius, but is a pervasive feature of intellectual life today: the specialization that divides philosophers, theologians, literary scholars and historians and makes them each seek in figures from the past only what relates to their own discipline. The second, by contrast, is directly related to how Boethius is usually perceived.