Isidore of Seville's Taxonomy of Magicians and Diviners

Klingshirn, William E.

doi:10.1353/trd.2003.0006

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Magical methods of contacting the dead tended to seek practical information (as Anna Megerler did), rather than simply finding out what had happened to them: the early medieval writer Isidore of Seville, whose definitions of magic influenced many later writers, defined 'necromancy' as [bringing] 'the dead back to life to prophesy and answer questions [my emphasis]'. 37 The exempla which present making agreements to return as legitimate, by contrast, only ask about their friend's condition in the afterlife, although the dead friend sometimes offers other information, such as the dead man's revelation in Thomas of Cantimpre's collection that he had been right to refuse a bishopric while alive because in that position, he would have risked damnation. 38 These exempla do not say explicitly that their protagonists asked their friends to return for the right reasons, but exempla and confession manuals were produced in the same settings, by friars and other churchmen engaged in pastoral care, so that the contents of one set of sources would probably have been known to the authors of the other.…”

Section: Magicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Agreements to Return from the Afterlife in Late MedievalExempla

Rider

2009

Stud. Church Hist.

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One of the ways in which medieval Christians thought about the links between this life and the afterlife was by telling ghost stories – a topic which has attracted the attention of several historians. In these stories, a dead person often appears to a living relative or friend and asks them to give alms or to perform other good works on their behalf, in order to speed up their passage to heaven. The dead person usually appears spontaneously, although sometimes this occurs after relatives have said prayers for them. This paper, however, will examine a group of stories about less spontaneous apparitions. These are stories in which two people agree that whichever of them dies first will come back and tell the other about the afterlife. They have sometimes been mentioned in studies of medieval ghost stories, but they have not been examined in their own right.

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Section: Magicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Agreements to Return from the Afterlife in Late MedievalExempla

Rider

2009

Stud. Church Hist.

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Is Astrology a Type of Divination? Thomas Aquinas, the Index of Prohibited Books, and the Construction of a Legitimate Astrology in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Rutkin

2019

Int. J. Divin. Prognostication

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What is the relationship between astrology and divination? In particular, is astrology a type of divination, as is often asserted or assumed? In both astrology and divination, knowledge and prediction of the future are primary goals, but does this warrant calling astrology a form of divination? I approach these questions by exploring the response of Thomas Aquinas, which was to be extremely influential for many centuries. First I analyze in some detail Thomas’s answer in his Summa theologiae 2-2.92–95; then I discuss two significant sixteenth-century examples of its influence: the 1557, 1559, 1564, and later indexes of prohibited books; and Pope Sixtus V’s anti-divinatory bull, Coeli et Terrae Creator (1586). In this way, we can explore some of the complex historical dynamics at play in the construction of a legitimate astrology in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

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Isidore of Seville's Taxonomy of Magicians and Diviners

Cited by 2 publications

References 18 publications

Agreements to Return from the Afterlife in Late MedievalExempla

Agreements to Return from the Afterlife in Late MedievalExempla

Is Astrology a Type of Divination? Thomas Aquinas, the Index of Prohibited Books, and the Construction of a Legitimate Astrology in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

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