We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
'Thes byne the knoyng off dremys': Mantic Alphabets in Late Medieval English.
- Authors
Chardonnens, László Sándor
- Abstract
This article publishes and contextualises three mantic alphabets in English from fifteenth-century medical manuscript miscellanies. Mantic alphabets are a form of bibliomantic dream divination that first arose in the twelfth century and disappeared in the sixteenth century. From their four-hundred-year period of transmission, mantic alphabets were hitherto not known to exist in English, though texts in other British vernaculars, such as Anglo-Norman and Welsh, had been identified and published before. Even so, this form of oneiromancy is virtually unknown to scholars of practical science ( Fachliteratur, artes) in late medieval England, probably because it occupied a peripheral position in practical science, and indeed in medieval dream divination in general. To remedy this shortcoming, the English mantic alphabets are here printed side by side and situated in a corpus of over ninety texts in Latin and a range of European vernaculars, assembled in the course of several years of archival research in historical libraries in Europe and the United States.
- Subjects
MIDDLE English language; ENGLISH language alphabet; ALPHABETS; GERMANIC languages; FRENCH language
- Publication
Anglia: Journal of English Philology / Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie, 2014, Vol 132, Issue 3, p473
- ISSN
0340-5222
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1515/ang-2014-0055