 Dante was working in a tradition that went back to Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, a philosophical discussion using personification and an elaborate prose and verse literary form. The Consolation was translated into almost every European vernacular; its influence mixed with that of twelfth-century Latin works that looked back to it, such as Bernardus Silvestris’s Cosmographia (based also on the Timaeus) and Alain of Lille’s Complaint of Nature. The first of the vernacular philosophical poems to draw on this heritage was the continuation in the 1270s of the Roman de la Rose by Jean de Meun, a lawyer who had close connections with the University of Paris (Morton &amp; Nievergelt 2020). With both the Roman and the Commedia in mind, the late fourteenth-century English writers Chaucer and Langland wrote philosophical poetry (Troilus and Criseyde, Piers Plowman) (Coleman 1981).