In book III of Boethius's Latin Consolatio philosophiae (Consolation of Philosophy), Philosophia tells Boethius that her remaining teaching will cause pain when first tasted yet grow sweet when ingested. When the Old English Boethius translates this section, however, Wisdom (Philosophia's vernacular counterpart) adds the further specification that this medicine will be ‘swide swete to belcettan’ – very sweet to belch. The metaphor of digestion extends a consideration of affective apprehension and contemplation that the text develops at some length, acknowledging that her previous, simpler teaching had been ingested swa lustlice (so eagerly) when her pupil wanted ‘mid inneweardan mode hi ongiton and smeagean’ (to perceive and examine it with the inward mind). But where the Latin warns, strikingly, that he will not be able to perceive the true felicity while his sight remains ‘occupato ad imagines’ (occupied with images), the Old English names the problem not as images themselves but only ‘ansine dissa leasena gesalda’ (the likeness of these false felicities). In both the Latin text and the Old English translation, we meet metaphors for the affective reception of instruction as well as instruction by means of such metaphors and images, and in both, sweetness is more than a mere coating on a bitter pill – rather, bitter experience must first be borne in order for lasting sweetness to come about. Elaborate, affectively engaged metaphors and narrative exempla can thus guide the weak from error, yet as Wisdom warns, their influence over the emotions has the power to lead one astray. The digestive metaphor anticipates later figures of belching that will appear in, for example, Bernard of Clairvaux. But in context, the Old English elaboration of the image suggests that both the sweetness, and certain kinds of similitude, must persist, as the Latin text increasingly leaves both of these things behind in favor of increasingly abstract philosophy. As Mary Carruthers has argued, sweetness as a medieval aesthetic category denotes not an abstract concept of beauty but a ‘definable sensory phenomenon’, a bodily one, and one that did not necessarily entail a preconceived moral judgment. This characteristic of embodied sensory experience and not abstracted, conceptual goodness made such sweetness particularly salient for the English translator of the Boethius.