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Podcast: New Books in Western European Studies
Episode: Joanne Edge, "Onomantic Divination in Late Medieval Britain: Questioning Life, Predicting Death" (York Medieval Press, 2024)
Description: When will I die? What is the sex of my unborn child? Which of two rivals will win a duel? As today, people in the later Middle Ages approached their uncertainties about the future, from the serious to the mundane, in a variety of ways. One of the most commonly surviving prognostic methods in medieval manuscripts is onomancy: the branch of divination that predicts the future from calculations based on the numbers that correlate to the letters of personal names. However, despite its ubiquity, it has been relatively little studied.Onomantic Divination in Late Medieval Britain: Questioning...