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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Anthony Kaldellis, "Romanland: Ethnicity and Empire in Byzantium" (Harvard UP, 2019)
Clare K. Rothschild, "The Muratorian Fragment: Text, Translation, Commentary" (Mohr Siebeck, 2022)
Angela Kim Harkins, "An Embodied Reading of the Shepherd of Hermas: The Book of Visions and Its Role in Moral Formation" (Equinox, 2023)
William R. Jankowiak, "Illicit Monogamy: Inside a Fundamentalist Mormon Community" (Columbia UP, 2023)
Sarah Diefendorf, "The Holy Vote: Inequality and Anxiety Among White Evangelicals" (U California Press, 2023)
Daniel I. Block, "The Gospel According to Moses: A Commentary on Deuteronomy" (Inspirata Publishing, 2023)
Eugenio Refini, "Staging the Soul: Allegorical Drama as Spiritual Practice in Baroque Italy" (Legenda, 2022)
Richard L. Bushman, "Joseph Smith's Gold Plates: A Cultural History" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Nicholas Morton, "The Crusader States and their Neighbours: A Military History, 1099-1187" (Oxford UP, 2020)
Neall W. Pogue, "The Nature of the Religious Right: The Struggle between Conservative Evangelicals and the Environmental Movement" (Cornell UP, 2022)
"Apocalypto" and Mel Gibson (with Jonathon Fessenden)
On Henry Einspruch's 1941 Yiddish Translation of the Christian Bible
Jacob L. Wright, "Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and Its Origins" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
Darnise C. Martin, "Beyond Christianity: African Americans in a New Thought Church" (NYU Press, 2005)
Kami Fletcher and Ashley Towle, "Grave History: Death, Race, and Gender in Southern Cemeteries" (U Georgia Press, 2023)
James Robson, "Word and Spirit in Ezekiel" (T&T Clark, 2006)
Matthew Carr, "Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain, 1492-1614" (Hurst, 2017)
The Men We Need (with Brant Hansen)
Alastair J. Roberts, "Echoes of Exodus: Tracing Themes of Redemption through Scripture" (Crossway, 2018)
Margaret M. McGuinness, "Katharine Drexel and the Sisters Who Shared Her Vision" (Paulist Press, 2023)
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