A posteriori

BODILY HUMORS: See "humors, bodily."

BODY POLITIC, THE: The monarchial government, including all its citizens, its army, and its king. Political theory in the Elizabethan period thought of each kingdom as a "body," with the king functioning as its head. Events affecting the body politic, such as political turmoil, warfare, and plague, would be mirrored in the macrocosm, the microcosm, and the Chain of Being (see below).

BOETHIAN: Having to do with the philosophy of Boethius, i.e., a philosophy of predestination suggesting all events appearing evil, misfortunate, disastrous, or accidental are none of these things. Rather, such events are illusions that only appear this way to humans because we are limited in our perceptions while bound by time. In actuality, such events serve a higher beneficial purpose that must remain unknown to us as long as we are trapped by the limits of the physical universe. The term comes from the philosopher Boethius, who formulated an argument concerning it in his immensely influential work, Consolatio Philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy), which he wrote in 524 AD while awaiting his execution in prison on unjust charges. To give the reader an idea of how popular this book was in the Middle Ages, over five hundred manuscripts of it survive today; in comparison, Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales only survives in about eighty-two manuscripts. A common intellectual party-game in medieval times may have been to take turns reciting lines of the Consolatio by memory.

Boethian thought profoundly influenced Chaucer, who wrote Boece, his own translation of the Latin text. The concerns of Boethius were profoundly influential in Chaucer's "Knight's Tale" and Troilus and Criseyde. In "The Knight's Tale," Palamoun and Arcite's plight in prison is in many ways akin to that of the semi-autobiographical narrator in the Consolatio, and Duke Theseus' famous speech about the First Mover is a rough paraphrase of Boethian thought. In the conclusion to Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Troilus' spirit floating over the battle and laughing at the small scale of the war and his old, bitter, fleshly desires is another Boethian moment.

BOUND MORPHEME: A morpheme used exclusively as part of a larger word rather than one that can stand alone and retain independent meaning. Examples include the morpheme ept in the word inept, or the morpheme gruntle in the word disgruntled. This term is the opposite of a free morpheme, which can function by itself as a word, such as the morphemes it and self in the word itself.

BORDER: In medieval manuscripts, a border is, as Kathleen Scott puts it, "A type of book decoration placed around one to four sides of the justification [writing space] in order to distinguish and decorate main divisions of the text; usually more elaborate on the first page and/or Table of Contents page; also used around miniature frames" (Scott 370).