Onomantic Divination in Late Medieval Britain: Questioning Life, Predicting Death

Demonstrates the wide prevalence of supposedly impermissible divination techniques found in a wide range of manuscripts from medieval Britain.

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 t...