New Books in Christian Studies
Religion & Spirituality:Christianity
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 Life, Predicting Death (York Medieval Press, 2024) by Dr. Joanne Edge analyses the intellectual and physical contexts of onomantic texts in some 65 manuscripts of British provenance between around 1150 and 1500, focusing on its two main varieties It demonstrates that onomancies were copied, owned and used by a people from a wide range of literate society in late medieval England: medical practitioners; the gentry and aristocracy; university scholars; and monks. And it seeks to answer the question of why a divinatory device, condemned in canon law as "Pythagorean necromancy", enjoyed such popularity in mainstream books of religion, medicine, and scholasticism.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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Robin Darling Young et al, "Evagrius of Pontus: The Gnostic Trilogy" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Francis X. Clooney, S.J., "Hindu and Catholic, Priest and Scholar: A Love Story" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
Mark Letteney, "The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity: Intellectual and Material Transformations" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
Krista E. Hughes et al., "Ecological Solidarities: Mobilizing Faith and Justice for an Entangled World" (Penn State UP, 2019)
Anthony Kaldellis, "The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Robert Weis, "For Christ and Country: Militant Catholic Youth in Post-Revolutionary Mexico" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
Jeremiah Coogan, "Eusebius the Evangelist: Rewriting the Fourfold Gospel in Late Antiquity" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Reid B. Locklin, "Hindu Mission, Christian Mission: Soundings in Comparative Theology" (SUNY Press, 2024)
Yaakov Beasley, "Joel, Obadiah, and Micah: Facing the Storm" (Maggid, 2024)
Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg, "The Abrahamic Vernacular" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism—and What Comes Next
Andrew S. Jacobs, "Gospel Thrillers: Conspiracy, Fiction, and the Vulnerable Bible" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
Natasha L. Mikles, "Shattered Grief: How the Pandemic Transformed the Spirituality of Death in America" (Columbia UP, 2024)
Tabitha Stanmore, "Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic" (Bloombury, 2024)
Timothy Grieve-Carlson, "American Aurora: Environment and Apocalypse in the Life of Johannes Kelpius" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Neena Mahadev, "Karma and Grace: Religious Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka" (Columbia UP, 2023)
Elizabeth Aislinn O'Brien, "Surgery and Salvation: The Roots of Reproductive Injustice in Mexico, 1770-1940" (UNC Press, 2023)
Verso l’Alto (with Christine Wohar)
Ben Wright, "Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism" (LSU Press, 2020)
Peter Murray Jones, "The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England" (Boydell & Brewer, 2024)
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