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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Benjamin E. Park, "Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier" (Liveright, 2020)
Deidre Nicole Green, "Jacob: A Brief Theological Introduction" (Neal A. Maxwell Institute, 2020)
Donald Harman Akenson, "The Americanization of the Apocalypse: Creating America's Own Bible" (Oxford UP. 2023)
Elizabeth S. Hurd and Winnifred F. Sullivan, "At Home and Abroad: The Politics of American Religion" (Columbia UP, 2021)
Revival (with Fr Norman Fischer): The Holy Spirit at Work in Kentucky . . . and Many Other Places
Live Not by Lies: A Conversation with Rod Dreher
Catherine Wanner, "Everyday Religiosity and the Politics of Belonging in Ukraine" (Cornell UP, 2022)
Jacques Dalarun et al., "A Female Apostle in Medieval Italy: The Life of Clare of Rimini" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)
This is My Body: Communion and Cannibalism in Colonial New England and New France
Leah Mickens, "In the Shadow of Ebenezer: A Black Catholic Parish in the Age of Civil Rights and Vatican II" (NYU Press, 2022)
David I. Kertzer, "The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler" (Random House, 2022)
The Gospel According to Dorothy (with Kathryn Wehr)
Gay on God's Campus: Mobilizing for LGBT Equality at Christian Colleges and Universities
God, The Founders, and Natural Law: A Conversation with Phil Muñoz
Philip Jenkins, "He Will Save You from the Deadly Pestilence: The Many Lives of Psalm 91" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Gary Kulik: Conscientious Objector Who Served in Vietnam
Joshua D. Schendel, "The Necessity of Christ's Satisfaction: A Study of the Reformed Scholastic Theologians William Twisse (1578-1646) and John Owen (1616-1683)" (Brill, 2022)
Margaret Chowning, "Catholic Women and Mexican Politics, 1750–1940" (Princeton UP, 2023)
John Soderberg, "Animals and Sacred Bodies in Early Medieval Ireland: Religion and Urbanism at Clonmacnoise" (Lexington Books, 2021)
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