Pastoral Care and Prognostics in the Carolingian Period. The Case of El Escorial, Real Biblioteca di San Lorenzo, ms L III 8

This article tries to answer the question of what prognostic texts, often interpreted as ‘superstitious’ or even ‘pagan’, might be doing in a pastoral compendium of the Carolingian period. Rather than following the classical interpretation of prognostics as texts that belonged outside Christendom, it argues that, to the contrary, such texts fit in very well in a context of early medieval pastoral care and trustworthy Christian knowledge. What counted here was not their pre-Christian origins, but the fact that they were anchored in the highly respected tradition of computus, the science of Christian time-reckoning. There was, therefore, no inherent problem in early medieval minds to use prognostics for pastoral purposes. This, in turn, sheds new light on the position of the priest who dispensed pastoral care to communities of laymen : given their use of prognostics, their expertise had to extend to areas that are beyond our modern understanding of religion

Compendium · Prognostics · Trustworthiness · Historical, Literary, and Cultural Studies · Medieval and Early Modern Iberia · Medieval Literature and History

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