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Showing posts from December, 2014

Word of the month: fitonesse

Prophecies and divinations were very much a part of the medieval spiritual landscape and the Christmas miracle, and the coming of Christ the Messiah, was one of the most important events in Christian theology foretold in several passages of the Old Testament. [1] Prophecy, however, even if considered as the only legitimate channel for predicting the future as decreed by the Church, was not the only means for foretelling things to come. This is reflected in the variety of Anglo-Norman vocabulary we have for describing not only the acts of divination, e.g. devination , geomancie , garmenterie , but the practitioners themselves, such as devineur and nigromancien , using various and often, to the modern eye, dubious methods to predict the future. But whereas the headwords such as prophete , devineur and nigromancien come with a string of related words in the AND , some of which are still in use today in modern English and French [2] , albeit in different form, fitonesse stands out as