The various Latin and Old English texts which have come to be called ‘prognostics’
have not, in general, been well served by scholars. For some texts the only
available edition is Oswald Cockayne's Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of
Early England from 1864-6; most others are available only in the broad but somewhat
unsystematic series of articles published by Max Förster in Archiv für das
Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen in the 1910s and 1920s. Anselm
Hughes does not include the eight prognostic texts in Cambridge, Corpus Christi
College 391 in his otherwise fairly thorough edition of much of that manuscript; Peter Baker and Michael Lapidge omit any discussion of such texts from
their excellent survey of the history of the computus in the preface to their
edition of Byrhtferth's Enchiridion. The mid-eleventh-century Christ Church
manuscript now known as London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iii has
attracted the notice of many fine scholars, including liturgists, linguists and
monastic and art historians, who have been drawn to the series of texts at the
beginning of the manuscript (fols. 117-73 and 2-27), including two magnicent
full-page drawings (117v and 2v) 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’. Despite their
appreciation of these manuscript sequences, however, few scholars have
included in their study of this material the eighteen prognostic texts which
follow the Regularis Concordia in the manuscript (27v-47), though most of these
are in the same hand and are arranged, it may be argued, with equal care.