The Twelve Days of 'Wind-mas'

Prognostication by the holiday calendar (+worksheets)

Early Medieval English prognostics are a topic near and dear to my heart. Having spent countless hours poring over their structure and content, I’ve come to appreciate them within the social and cultural milieu in which they were produced.

The term “prognostics” is an anachronism. Established by modern scholars, the term applies to texts that are concretely or loosely predictive of various future states, including the weather, mundane events, the success of journeys, the outcome of bloodletting, and whether dreams dreamt might come true. (And that’s just to name a few!) Although the term encompasses a mind-boggling array of texts, the scribes that copied them likely never understood them as such. Richard Shaw pointed out that, to your average early Medieval monk, a “prognostic” was “a treatise on the foreseeing of the progression of diseases,” per our old friend Isidore of Seville’s definition, making the term somewhat ill-fitting for what the texts purport to do (Shaw, 2014: 332).

There are medical components to these texts, of course, captured in a range of dietary, hygienic and phlebotematic (is that a word?) guidance—whether a prohibition on letting blood during the days following Sirius’ rise in the summer, or a restriction on eating gooseflesh during prescribed times. However, prognostic texts also contain predictions on the success of the annual harvest, the characteristics of an infant born according to the lunar day in each lunation cycle, and even impending storms based on the colour of the moon. Given the breadth of the predictions—and the fact that, on the face of it, they appear to fall outside of normative Christian beliefs—contemporary scholars have tended to view them as clerical superstitions that came to attach themselves to very “Christian” manuscripts, like the computus (the “manual” to support the calculation of the annual date of Easter), owing to their predominantly calendrical structure.

Some prognostic texts address this head-on, as if their scribes were speaking to us from across the temporal divide. In London, British Library, Cotton Caligula A .xv, Roy Liuzza noted that, referring to a calendar of inauspicious days, one scribe wrote, “Nis þis nan wiglung”—“This is no sorcery”—as if presupposing that devout contemporaries and twenty-first century scholars might grapple with the co-location of these seemingly peculiar texts alongside astronomical and encyclopedic notes and devotional material, such as private prayers (Liuzza, 2004: 3).

The heyday of prognostic texts was undoubtedly around the tenth-century Benedictine Reform when they appeared to be copied extensively and transmitted from important monastic centres such as Winchester and Canterbury. However, the prognostic texts that were copied were by no means tenth-century inventions; the onomantic devices (onomancy being using the number of letters in a person’s name for divinatory purposes) such as the Spheres of Life and Death were first believed to have been translated into Latin from Greek sources in the sixth century and lunaries that describe the quality of time for bloodletting have attestations in earlier centuries (Sigerist, 1942: 293).

The two free worksheets this month (paywalled after December) are inspired by holiday-themed prognostic texts: a Twelve Days of Christmas prognostic in Old English, and a Pseudo-Edras in time for New Year’s Day in Latin. A bit more about these two prognostics may be found below.

The Twelve Days of Christmas Prognostic (Old English)

For Old English learners, the Twelve Days of Christmas prognostic is an accessible text, especially if you are still at the beginning of your language journey. Although adapted, this practice should enable the reading of similar prognostics encountered in other manuscripts or edited transcriptions.

The original prognostic text interprets the occurrence of wind according to the Twelve Days (or rather nights) of Christmas. Each night includes the corresponding prediction based on the occurrence of wind. The predictions are largely for the year ahead and range from food shortages to deaths, diseases, shipwrecks and other cheery topics.

In her dissertation on the Twelve Days of Christmas and Revelatio Esdrae prognostics, Maria Carmela Cesario noted correspondences between weather omens, Biblical references and even comparable Babylonian prognostications, the last of which potentially suggests that the origin of this weather omen predates the Christianization of its content (Cesario, 2007: 56-57).

The worksheet totals seven pages—two pages for the reading, followed by two pages on a grammatical topic (in this case strong a-stem nouns), and three pages of exercises. I mainly followed Thomas Oswald Cockayne’s translation for my glossing of certain terms, but kept the original text as close to the spirit of Cockayne’s transcription—grammatical peculiarities and all. The exercises include identifying the Old English phase corresponding to the Modern English translation (or you could simply translate the phrase back into Old English), as well as vocabulary practice. There’s an acrostic puzzle, too!

Pseudo-Edras (Latin)

Scholars generally agree that year-ahead prognostications are the most numerous in prognostic texts dealing with meteorological phenomena (Chardonnes, 2007: 491). Variants include the weekday (feria) on which January 1 falls (as per the reading and worksheet available this month) or alternatively the day on which Christmas falls. While the latter variant appears after 1100, the former is among the earlier attested prognostics dating back to the eighth century (Chardonnes, 2007: 493).

Attributed to the Biblical prophet Ezra, the Pseudo-Edras prognostic contained in the worksheet appears in London, British Library, Cotton Titus D. xxvi, ff. 10v-11v, commonly known as Ælfwine’s Prayerbook. The private devotional manuscript is quite compact and was believed to have been produced for the abbot of the New Minster, Winchester in the first-half of the eleventh century. Its contents includes calendrical and computistical material, private prayers and devotions, one of the surviving copies of Ælfric’s De temporibus anni (which we visited thanks to Henry Sweet in a previous post), and, of course, a wide variety of prognostic texts.

Also totaling seven pages, the adapted prognostic text in the worksheet is glossed according to the usual Ørberg-inspired style with modifications to the original. Exercises include translation back into Latin, identifying vocabulary, and a vocab-building acrostic puzzle. The grammar bite highlights adjectives of the third declension.

As always, I try to keep these sheets error-free, but being an operation of one, occasional errors will creep in, so I do apologize in advance if you spot any. You’re also welcome to e-mail me concerning any you catch at studieslatin@gmail.com so I can reissue correct pages to subscribers.

In the New Year, I have some astrological and magical material planned for paid subscribers, so do consider upgrading your subscription if the mood strikes. I try to release one Latin and one Old English worksheet a month.

Sources:

Text versions of the two prognostic types discussed may be found through the Helsinki Corpus Browser.

Ælfwine’s Prayerbook: London, British Library, Cotton Titus D. XXVI + XXVII, ed. by Beate Günzel (London: Boydell Press, 1993)

Cesario, Maria Carmela, ‘Anglo-Saxon Prognostics: The Twelve Nights Of Christmas And The Revelatio Esdrae’ (published doctoral dissertation, University of Manchester, 2007).

Liuzza, Roy, ‘What is and is not Magic: The Case of Anglo-Saxon Prognostics’, Societas Magica Newsletter 12 (2004), pp. 1-4. <https://www.societasmagica.org/userfiles/files/ Newsletters/docs/SMN_Spring_2004_ Issue_12. pdf>

Shaw, Richard, ‘“Just as the Books Tell Us”: A New Work by Ælfric?’, Notes and Queries 61.3 (2014), 328-336.

Sigerist, Henry E., ‘“The Sphere of Life and Death” in Early Medieval Manuscripts’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 11.3 (1942), 292-303.