Anglo-Saxon Prognostics: An Edition and Translation of Texts from London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius A.iii ed. by Roy Liuzza (review)

Western medieval societies, like their antecedents in the ancient world, valued the ability to foresee future events through the interpretation of predictive signs—what can be called prognosis or prognostication in the narrow sense. And although Christian authorities occasionally denounced "divination"—that is, technologies to inquire into the future—there were also many ways in which even divination could be absorbed into the dominant religious worldview, provided that it was God who was asked for guidance, and not pagan divinities or demons. In consequence, prognostica and sometimes divination materials that originated in the Greco-Roman world were transmitted in medieval manuscripts of impeccably orthodox and scholarly character, notably medical compilations, liturgical volumes, and above all computus manuscripts. Computus was the medieval Latin term for the body of precept, data, and technique deployed to manage the calendar, and in particular to calculate the dates of Easters to come. Like the physician at the patient's bedside, the computist focused on future outcomes, and grounded his science in the ability to make that outcome certain. Hence the manuscript books that supported these two enterprises—books that were frequently albums or compilations of texts and tables—offered an ideal refuge for prognostic texts. These texts included lunaria or lists of predictions relating to births, illnesses, the advisability of bloodletting, the prophetic value of dreams, and so forth linked to the thirty days of the calculated synodic lunar month; catalogs of lucky and unlucky calendar dates or days of the lunar month, often tied to prescriptions concerning diet, purgation, and bloodletting; or prophecies concerning weather, harvests, and health for the year, based on the weekday of New Year's Day, or the day on which the first thunder of the year is heard. Such prognostica elided readily into texts of a more divinatory character, such as the dream-interpretation manuals, or the many versions of the "sphere of life and death" that calculated the outcome of illness from a combination of the age of the moon at onset and the numerical value of the letters composing the patient's name.

This permeable boundary between prognosis and prognostication, and between prognostication and divination, has until recently served to consign all these materials to the categories of superstition or folklore. In the English-speaking world, this has been subtly reinforced by the fact that scholarship on vernacular prognostica has far outstripped research on the Latin texts that lay behind them. Old English was a precocious literary language, and a significant part of its corpus comprises translations and adaptations of Latin works, including prognostica. But philological interest in documenting the evolution of the language encouraged editorial practices that plucked the texts out of their manuscript settings, where they were intermingled with Latin materials. This extractive approach succeeded in concealing the essentially clerical and learned character of prognostica. For example, Oswald Cockayne's popular collection of vernacular medical, astronomical, and computistical texts, Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England (London, 1864-66), printed a number of prognostica in volume 3, but when Charles Singer reissued Cockayne in 1961, he omitted the prognostica, apparently because he considered them unworthy to accompany genuine works of science. Max Förster published numerous Old English prognostic texts in a series of articles in Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen between 1908 and 1916, tellingly titled "Beiträge zur mittelalterlichen Volkskunde" (Contributions to Medieval Folklore). For his part, Heinrich Henel, a pioneering scholar of the history of vernacular computus, went so far as to demote these materials to the rank of "Mönchsaberglaube" (monastic superstition).¹

One of the most important contributions of Roy Liuzza's Anglo-Saxon Prognostics is resolutely to situate Old English vernacular prognostics in the clerical and scholarly milieu of their manuscript vehicles, and hence to...