Walter Odington’s De etate mundi and the Pursuit of a Scientific Chronology in Medieval England

This article deals with a forgotten treatise on the age of the world, written between 1308 and 1316 by Walter Odington, a monk of Evesham Abbey, otherwise known for his writings on alchemy and music theory. By tracing the sources and rationale behind Odington’s arguments and comparing them with those of other medieval authors, the article attempts to shed new light on the state of chronological scholarship in England in the eleventh to fourteenth centuries, when astronomical and astrological methods were freely used to supplement or replace scriptural interpretation, yielding creative and unexpected results.