I was reading about Boethius' De Consolatione Philosophieae, which was an influential work in the middle ages. Are there other works from classic writers (Cato and Tacitus, perhaps?) or "contemporary" medieval writers that would have been must-read for a (secular) medieval man?
I'm going to pull a bit up from the other thread here:
But there was a difference between "those who pray" - bishops, friars, priests -, "those who fight" and "those who work"... What about the rest of learned society? "Secular" may not be the appropriate term, but I can't think of another one.
The tripartite division didn't really exist, but that's for a thread on feudalism (see the FAQ). "Secular," in a medieval context, refers to clergy who are not professed monastics - a bishop is a member of the secular clergy. This is opposed to the regular clergy, which are those who have taken monastic vows. Both secular and regular clergy are divided from the laity, who are not in any sort of holy orders.
However, all persons attending a university were de iure clerics, though unordained. Those who wished to pursue careers in the church would seek ordination, but many did not and thus lost their clerical status, so the dividing line isn't particularly clear.
In other words, the answer to your questions varies greatly based on how and in what subjects you got your education.
There are some baseline texts. Medieval Latin instruction began with the Bible, usually the psalms. Added to this would be some sort of grammar, which were based around classical rhetoricians, usually Cicero, and poets, usually Ovid and Virgel (Tacitus was almost unknown before the fourteenth century). And there were several popular texts or collections, such as The Golden Legend, which would have been in common circulation.
Beyond this small corpus, it would be very difficult to single out texts that any given educated person would have read. The great Patristics may have made an appearance, as might Lombard's Sentences or various saints' lives not found in the Legend, and it's possible such a person would have encountered some chanson de geste, if he could read French.
We can look at Dante Alighieri for inspiration for this answer. His book, Divina Commedia, was written between 1308 and 1320. We can look at the sources he was familiar with and reasonably say that many well-educated men in 13th century Italy would've also been familiar with them.
Some of the major influences on the Commedia were Virgil's Aeneid, Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics. Dante would've been familiar with the Bible as well, and Greek/Roman mythology of course. We also know Dante was familiar with Boethius De Consolatione Philosophiae and Cicero's De Amicitia because Dante says so in an earlier work, the Convivio. He also took part in the Franciscan and Dominican disputes and would've been familiar with the works of St. Bonaventure and other works by Thomas Aquinas.
Dante does reference many other people, such as Plato, Socrates, and Epicurus, but he appears to only have a superficial understanding of these philosophers.
Source: The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno. A verse translation by Allen Mandelbaum.
Since op mentioned it it got me wondering how many secular medieval men there would have been in 13th century Italy and how would they have been viewed by their contemporaries?