An English Source for a Latin Text?: Wind Prognostication in Oxford, Bodleian, Hatton 115 and Ashmole 345

Abstract

This article focuses on a type of prognostication that bases its predictions on the behavior of the wind during the twelve nights of Christmas and in particular on the relationship between the Old English version in Oxford, Bodleian, Hatton 115, and a fourteenth/fifteenth-century English text in Latin of the same prognostication, which appears in Oxford, Bodleian, Ashmole 345, fol. 69r. The wind prognostication in Ash-mole 345 is remarkably similar to the twelfth-century OE version in Hatton 115, fol. 149v, to the extent that one might be tempted to argue for direct transmission, if it were not for the large temporal gap between the two manuscripts and for the fact that the two texts are being transmitted in two different languages. Interestingly the Latin text in A contains an Old English word that may make us reconsider the relationship between the two manuscripts and may shed light on the reception and transmission of Old English and prognostication by the wind between the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth centuries in English monastic centers.

Knowledge of the weather in the Middle Ages: Libellus de disposicione totius anni futuri1

“…No evident religious symbolism is attached to the other brontology in the collection, this time arranged according to the months of the year on which thunder is heard, tonitrua sonuerint (V), which the scribe labels alia prophecia (another prophecy). The majority of its predictions, in a similar vein as those contained in I, exhibit diverse agricultural and human concerns: validos ventos, annum tempestuosum or iocundum et fructiferum, sterilitatem or abundancia frugrum, famem, bellum, lites or pacem populo, mortem, infirmitatem and concordiam in omnibus.The wind is the main predictive agent in III, a fairly widespread prognostication which bases its predictions on the blowing of the wind during the twelve nights of Christmas 29. The earliest known Latin exemplar for this prognostication appears in the ninth-century computistical Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, n.a.l., MS 1616, fol.…”