Search Results

This chapter deals with Ireland from the 7th to the 12th centuries, which represents the oldest literary material from the medieval Celtic world. It shows that a conspicuously biblical paradigm for celestial portents held in the period. Churchmen recorded astronomical events throughout the early Middle Ages in the voluminous Irish annals, but their descriptions are coloured by the lurid apocalypticism characteristic of the early medieval Church. Thus comets and eclipses, for example, are transformed into ominous portents of Doomsday. The chapter then shows that this apocalyptic framework lies behind the depiction of heavenly portents in secular literature.

The book focuses on the contrary views of various sections regarding the theories of God's judgement and divine intervention. The tales of God's judgements and stories of prodigies and portents have revealed that novel priorities interweave with inherited formulas, and orthodox religious tenets blend with proverbial wisdom and indigenous folklore. The degree to which providential preaching and cheap print were interacting spheres of discourse in early modern England is highlighted in this chapter. The overall effect of Protestantism to leave the universe saturated with supernatural forces and moral significance is emphasized.

This chapter looks at three dimensions of Martin Luther’s teaching concerning miracles: his famous critique of the miracles long credited to the saints, his use of natural wonders to create propaganda for the early Reformation movement, and his attempts to reform belief in the supernatural and to foster a sense of divine presence within the developing evangelical church. Although he often discredited traditional beliefs in the power of the saints and argued that miracles were distinctly inferior forms of communication when compared to the power of the Scriptures, Luther admitted the reality of many wonders all the same. Thus his theology left open a space in which belief in natural wonders and signs might flourish in the new religion.

Chapter 3 treats the use of miracles in the works of the Lutheran natural philosopher, Job Fincel, who in the politically troubled years in the mid-sixteenth century published three widely read volumes of natural signs and miracles under the title Wonder Signs. Fueled by a sense that he was living in the world’s final days, Fincel fashioned his books as chronicles of the many events he believed were announcing the coming Last Judgment. Written in a highly dramatic style, Fincel’s texts were cheaply produced and widely read, and as a result they were to inspire a number of other evangelical authors in the years that followed to examine the subject of miracles as well.

A short coda brings the book’s methodologies to bear on a Chester play for which no practical cues are available: the Clothworkers’ Portents play. Examples from other Chester plays are offered to fill in the blanks of the Portents, including possible cues for audience interaction, technical spectacle, and the use of animals, suggesting that the distinctly early Cestrian performance style revealed throughout the book may be used in creative reconstructions—including, perhaps, new live performances—as well as in academic analyses.

What the Greeks called “the craft of divination” (mantik ē technē) was the art of interpreting the meaning of signs that were sent by the gods. The god-sent sign was the instrument of mediation between the knowledge of the gods and the more limited knowledge of humans. It was not only the responsibility of the seer to choose the correct interpretation amidst a range of possible interpretations; it was also essential first to recognize the sign as a sign. A chance event becomes an omen when the circumstances require it, “when the underlying tension of a personal situation kindles the signifying power of an omen.” The meaning of some omens and portents was obvious once they were recognized as such, of others less so; but in either case there could be no interpretation until the act of recognition had taken place. The experienced seer, therefore, needed both to recognize the portent and then to interpret it. The social function of divination, averting bad omens, a typology of Greek divination, the self-image of a seer, and what one could ask a seer are discussed.

If an animal is depicted with features that seem more man than beast, it might just be that the artist's real interest has to do with people. With their historical treasure of animal lore, Chinese artists frequently used animals as people in their discourse on human affairs. Sometimes appearances suggest this substitution, while sometimes this is done by the inscriptions and poems which accompany the painting and suggest its intent. This chapter is about one such case. It features horses, painted by the fourteenth-century artist Zhao Yong working in a world both lit and shadowed by his famous father, Zhao Mengfu, accused by some as disloyal to their royal Zhao-family forebears in serving the Mongol Yuan regime, and interrogated for generations to come about whether or not they felt disloyal. This is Zhao Yong's own visual narrative, dated 1352, of certain events, with texts by friend and relative, set against the backdrop of the first peasant uprisings that eventually undermined Mongol power in China.

The discourse of believing having been set out in Chapter 1, in the second chapter readers enter into the cult's disciples' world. This chapter opens with a description of a disciple's gear, that is, all the objects in his possession relating to the four weikza. Most important among these is an alchemy ball. The practice of alchemy is then explored down to its tiniest details. Alchemy, along with other aspects of the relations that bind people and weikza together described in this chapter, reveal that the principle that informs the whole range of the cult's practices, and so the way that one enacts the status of a disciple, is to try to compensate for a lack of vital energy by seeking to produce, receive, and accumulate it.

During the 250 years between the end of the Roman monarchy and the beginning of Roman historiography, the tale of Tarquin's expulsion was told in many different ways. Traces of the various versions can be found embedded in our much later texts as stories of portents – vultures that drove off eagles and killed their chicks, a giant snake that chased away the king and his cronies, a talking dog that portended the king's fall. What they imply is that the liberator Brutus was at first a sole magistrate; only later was a ‘consular’ colleague invented for him, and only in the late fourth century BC was he appropriated as an ancestor by the plebeian Iunii. The Iunii also claimed descent from Daunus the legendary king of Apulia, which may account for the prominence of ‘Daunian’ Ardea in the expulsion story.

In this chapter, which covers the months between the end of 1858 and the spring of 1859, the small world of Kurosawa Tokiko comes within full sight of large-scale history. A series of portents and fateful encounters alerted her to the ongoing crisis and made it unavoidable for a base-born woman to step out of her microcosm and become politically involved.

This chapter discusses the contributions of “Allochthons”—people who could be aliens, immigrants, refugees, or prisoners of war and were familiar with continental practices. The various domains of continental knowledge were organized through elaborate discourses framed by yin-yang hermeneutics and pragmatics based upon the Yijing (Book of Change). As far as the record shows, yin-yang knowledge came over sporadically from Paekche to Yamato during the sixth century. Its transmission took place with the ceremonial presentations of books and men of learning—usually Buddhist monks from Paekche—to the great Yamato kings in 513 and 553. Eventually, portents started to be exploited for political purposes in the beginning of the seventh century by the Soga clan.