Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘A Certain Foretelling of Future Things’: Divination and Onomancy, Definitions and Types
- 2 Platonic Relationships: Onomancy’s Intellectual and Visual Context
- 3 Lost in Translation: Greek Beginnings and Latin Corruptions, c. 400–c. 112
- 4 Body of Evidence: the Manuscript Corpus
- 5 Anathema Sit: Condemnation and Punishment
- 6 Certain Death? Onomancy and the Physician
- 7 Trial and Error: Onomancy and the Nobility
- 8 A Numbers Game: Onomancy at the University
- 9 Morbid Curiosity: Onomancy in the Monastery
- 10 Reformations: Onomancy c. 1500–c. 1700
- Conclusion
- Appendix I Transcriptions and Editions of ‘Sphere of Life and Death’ Texts
- Appendix II List of Manuscripts Containing Onomancies of British Provenance, 1150–1500
- Bibliography
- Index
- Health and Healing in the Middle Ages
1 - ‘A Certain Foretelling of Future Things’: Divination and Onomancy, Definitions and Types
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 May 2024
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘A Certain Foretelling of Future Things’: Divination and Onomancy, Definitions and Types
- 2 Platonic Relationships: Onomancy’s Intellectual and Visual Context
- 3 Lost in Translation: Greek Beginnings and Latin Corruptions, c. 400–c. 112
- 4 Body of Evidence: the Manuscript Corpus
- 5 Anathema Sit: Condemnation and Punishment
- 6 Certain Death? Onomancy and the Physician
- 7 Trial and Error: Onomancy and the Nobility
- 8 A Numbers Game: Onomancy at the University
- 9 Morbid Curiosity: Onomancy in the Monastery
- 10 Reformations: Onomancy c. 1500–c. 1700
- Conclusion
- Appendix I Transcriptions and Editions of ‘Sphere of Life and Death’ Texts
- Appendix II List of Manuscripts Containing Onomancies of British Provenance, 1150–1500
- Bibliography
- Index
- Health and Healing in the Middle Ages
Summary
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
Humpty Dumpty and Alice's discussion about the meaning of words in Lewis Carroll's 1872 novel Through the Looking-Glass illustrates a fundamental issue with defining concepts: words can mean several things to different people, and different things to the same people. Variance in time, language, place, religion and cosmological outlook makes this even harder. How, then, can something as broad as ‘divination’ be defined when it has meant different things to different people in different times and places? ‘Onomancy’, too, is hard to define and categorise since it is a Renaissance term projected backwards onto medieval material – as far as can be discerned, there was no medieval word for number–letter divination, even if compilers and scribes copied different onomantic devices together, seeing a link between them.
To illustrate the problem at hand, if you posed the question ‘what is divination and how is it different from magic, astrology, science and religion?’ to a member of ancient Greek society in the fifth century BCE, they might well be puzzled at the idea that divination was somehow separate from religion, because consulting the oracle at Delphi was how people communicated with the gods – divination was an integral part of state religion. Augustine, in fourth-century CE North Africa, would probably say there was no fundamental difference between divination, astrology and magic, and that all three were antithetical to his own religion – Christianity – since they all essentially operated via the power of demons, although there might be exceptions. Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, would be very clear on the distinctions between divination on the one hand, which was antithetical to his religion, and astrology used for certain purposes such as weather prediction or medical prognosis on the other, which was a branch of science (natural philosophy). If you stopped someone in the street in London in 2023 and asked them, they might well say that all four categories – religion, magic, astrology and divination – belong in the realm of superstition, and are antithetical to the category of ‘science’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Onomantic Divination in Late Medieval BritainQuestioning Life, Predicting Death, pp. 18 - 37Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2024