Chaucer's Boece is a peculiar work. At roughly 52,000 words in length, it is one of his longest compositions – longer than any of the individual Canterbury Tales, longer than the Astrolabe, and longer than the Legend of Good Women. Only Troilus and Criseyde, in fact, has more words. For another, it is in prose, which likens it only to the Melibee and the Parson's Tale as well as the Astrolabe in the Chaucer canon. Like these works and unlike all of Chaucer's poetry, the Boece, despite its fictional framework, is not the kind of poetic ‘fable’ rejected by the Parson but a ‘myrie tale in prose’, a work of ‘[m]oralitee and virtuous mateere’.

Perhaps for all these reasons, the reception history of the Boece, vis-à-vis that of Chaucer's other works, has been peculiar as well. Paull Baum, Margaret Schlauch, and other early critics found genuine rhetorical artistry in the translation. George Saintsbury even went so far as to say that in the Boece ‘we have … for the first time in Middle English, distinctly ornate prose, aureate in vocabulary, rhythmical in cadence and setting an example which, considering the popularity both of author and translator, could not fail to be of the greatest importance in the history of our literature’. The same exuberance for the rhetoric of the translation still appears periodically, as in discussions of Chaucer's ‘aestheticizing syntax’ or of his view of the act of translation as ‘inextri-cably both feminine and pedagogical’. But the far more common response, often based on a comparison of the Boece with modern editions of De consolatione philosophiae, has been much more tepid. George Kane, for example, observes only that ‘The often laboured prose of Chaucer's translation reflects his difficulties with both vocabulary and the intricacy of the Latin sentence structure.’ At times, this lack of enthusiasm borders on hostility, as when, less than two decades before Saintsbury's praise, H.F. Stewart observed that the ‘inaccuracy and infelicity’ of the Boece ‘is not that of an inexperienced Latin scholar, but rather of one who was no Latin scholar at all’.