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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Max Deardorff, "A Tale of Two Granadas: Custom, Community, and Citizenship in the Spanish Empire, 1568–1668" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
Craig Keener, "Christobiography: Memory, History, and the Reliability of the Gospels" (Eerdmans, 2019)
Gregg L. Frazer, "God against the Revolution: The Loyalist Clergy’s Case Against the American Revolution" (UP of Kansas, 2018)
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Daniel Soars, "The World and God Are Not-Two: A Hindu-Christian Conversation" (Fordham UP, 2022)
Joshua W. Jipp, "The Messianic Theology of the New Testament" (Eerdmans, 2020)
Milton Gaither, "Homeschool: An American History" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)
David M. Freidenreich, "Jewish Muslims: How Christians Imagined Islam as the Enemy" (U California Press, 2023)
Mario Baghos, "From the Ancient Near East to Christian Byzantium: Kings, Symbols, and Cities" (Cambridge Scholars, 2021)
Isaac Soon, "A Disabled Apostle: Impairment and Disability in the Letters of Paul" (Oxford UP, 2023)
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Kathy Stuart, "Suicide by Proxy in Early Modern Germany: Crime, Sin and Salvation" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)
Julia Watts Belser, "Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole" (Beacon Press, 2023)
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Abigail Agresta, "The Keys to Bread and Wine: Faith, Nature, and Infrastructure in Late Medieval Valencia" (Cornell UP, 2022)
Gary A. Anderson, "That I May Dwell Among Them: Incarnation and Atonement in the Tabernacle Narrative" (Eerdmans, 2023)
Anna M. Grzymała-Busse, "Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State" (Princeton UP, 2023)
J. Christopher Edwards, "Crucified: The Christian Invention of the Jewish Executioners of Jesus" (Fortress Press, 2023)
D. L. d'Avray, "The Power of Protocol: Diplomatics and the Dynamics of Papal Government, c. 400-c.1600" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
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