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Medieval Geomancy - Annotated Bibliography
Medieval Geomancy - Annotated Bibliography
Annotated Bibliography
To the best of my knowledge, none of the medieval treatises on geomancy
are available in modern English, nor do I know of any scholarly editions of
the texts, with the two exceptions noted below.
Primary Sources
Burnett, C.S.F. "What is the Experimentarius of Bernardus Silvestris? A
preliminary survey of the material." Archives d'histoire doctrinale et
littéraire du moyen age xliv (1977): 79-125. [Reprinted in Magic and
divination in the Middle Ages. Variorum Collected Studies Series CS557,
1996.]
Includes an edition of the "Experimentarius" of Bernardus Silvestris.
The "Experimentarius" describes a medieval predictive technique
based on geomancy but more arbitrary.
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9/8/2018 Medieval Geomancy: Annotated Bibliography
Bertelli, Sandro and Davide Cappi. "Per l'edizione del Libro di geomanzia
(BNCF, Magliabechiano XX 60)" Studi di filologia Italiana LXX (2012):
45-101.
An edition of a vernacular Italian text of the last quarter of the
thirteenth century.
Secondary Sources
Braswell-Means, Laurel. "The popular art of geomancy in the medieval West
and contemporary Asia." Journal of Popular Culture vol. 23 no. 4 (Spring
1990): 131-43.
Briefly discusses both Chinese and Western traditions of geomancy,
and argues that Chinese geomancy survives today because it is a part
of popular culture, while Western geomancy was a "learned" tradition
and therefore died out in the course of the seventeenth century.
Elizabeth Z. Bennett
ezb@princeton.edu
Copyright Elizabeth Bennett, 1998
Last revised: December 13, 2013
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