“Thes byne the knoyng off dremys”: Mantic Alphabets in Late Medieval English

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.