9 - Morbid Curiosity: Onomancy in the Monastery

Summary

A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.

Adso, the novice monk who narrates Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, set in a fourteenth-century Italian monastery, compares the curiosity monks have for books and knowledge with the sexual desires of laymen. This curiosity – which could spill over into the desire for forbidden knowledge – was one reason monasteries and monks continued to own manuscripts containing onomantic devices. However, the context had changed from the almost purely computistical nature of the early medieval corpus in which we find the ‘Sphere’ to much more diverse miscellanies in the later Middle Ages, when the ‘Victorious and Vanquished’ circulates in various recensions and languages too. Several monastic foundations can be positively identified as having owned manuscripts containing onomantic devices, and further manuscripts can be placed in the production and/or ownership of particular monks. The Cerne Abbey manuscript discussed below contains many items also on the Arts curriculum at Oxford University, which serves as a neat reminder that the medieval university and the monastery were inextricably linked. Oxford in particular had strong ties with both Franciscan and Augustinian priories from its foundation in the twelfth century. Many monks were sent to university to study, and all scholars were required to take at least minor orders before embarking on studies in the lower faculty of Arts. Monks and their books went back and forth between the university and the monastery, as did a vast array of texts and knowledge.

I identify two main reasons – seemingly polar opposites – as to why monks and monasteries took a keen interest in onomantic devices. For the first, Paxton's work on Cluniac death rituals is instructive. The Cluniac reforms of the Benedictine rule, which began in the tenth century, were extremely detailed about the rituals surrounding the death of any member of the monastery – a crucially important process that involved all the brethren. Therefore, the ability to accurately predict when someone might die or not was vitally important. So onomancies and other predictive devices were prevalent in monastic manuscripts.