London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A.iii, an eleventh-century manuscript miscellany from Christ Church, Canterbury, has attracted the notice of many scholars, most of whom have been drawn to the series of texts at the beginning of the manuscript (fols. 117–73 and 2–27), including two impressive full-page drawings and glossed copies of the Benedictine Rule and the Regularis Concordia. Helmut Gneuss describes this carefully presented series of interrelated texts as ‘a compendium of the Benedictine reform movements in Carolingian Francia and in tenth-century England’; Robert Deshman has argued that the very sequence of texts is ‘laden with meaning’. Few studies, however, have looked in detail at the series of eighteen prognostic texts which follow the Regularis Concordia in the manuscript (fols. 27v–47r), even though most of these are in the same hand and appear to have been arranged with equal care. This book presents a critical edition and study of these texts, as well as four related texts on 65r.

Prognostics have generally been regarded as texts on the cultural periphery, either a kind of popular folklore or learned pseudo-science, out of place in the monastic culture in which they circulated and of only marginal importance to the histories of the various disciplines—medicine, astronomy, computus—among whose texts they are preserved and with which they share a common purpose. Consequently there has been little study either of the transmission and textual histories of individual texts or of the cultural and intellectual contexts in which these texts were read and used.