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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Jonathan Greenaway, "Theology, Horror and Fiction: A Reading of the Gothic Nineteenth Century" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
Jeffrey Scholes, "Christianity, Race, and Sport" (Routledge, 2021)
Walter A. Maier III, "1 Kings 12-22: Concordia Commentary" (Concordia, 2019)
Walter A. Maier III, "1 Kings 1-11: Concordia Commentary" (Concordia, 2018)
Let Us Make Man in Our Image (with Paul Louis Metzger)
Megan Nutzman, "Contested Cures: Identity and Ritual Healing in Roman and Late Antique Palestine" (Edinburgh UP, 2022)
Austin Surls, "Making Sense of the Divine Name in the Book of Exodus: From Etymology to Literary Onomastics" (Eisenbrauns, 2017)
Ed Simon, "Elysium: A Visual History of Angelology" (Cernunnos, 2023)
Carson Bay, "Biblical Heroes and Classical Culture in Christian Late Antiquity" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Horace D. Hummel, "Ezekiel 21-48: Concordia Commentary" (Concordia, 2007)
Marion Gibson, "Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials" (Scribner, 2023)
Live from Israel (with Fr. Piotr Zelazko)
Matthew Thiessen, "A Jewish Paul: The Messiah's Herald to the Gentiles" (Baker Academic, 2023)
Ji Li, "At the Frontier of God's Empire: A Missionary Odyssey in Modern China" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Philip Jenkins, "A Storm of Images: Iconoclasm and Religious Reformation in the Byzantine World" (Baylor UP, 2023)
Jason C. Bivins, "Embattled America: The Rise of Anti-Politics and America's Obsession with Religion" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Kids These Days (with Jane Sloan Peters)
Gina A. Zurlo, "Women in World Christianity: Building and Sustaining a Global Movement" (Wiley-Blackwell, 2023)
A. Katie Harris, "The Stolen Bones of St. John of Matha: Forgery, Theft, and Sainthood in the Seventeenth Century" (Pennsylvania State UP, 2023)
Ben Witherington III, "Paul's Letter to the Romans: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary" (Eerdmans, 2004)
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