Building on the research done for his ReMA thesis, SOLEMNE’s Bruno Schalekamp just published his study of the so-called Sortes Sanctorum, a prognostic and divinatory text known as “lots of the saints”. It circulated widely in numerous medieval Latin manuscripts dating from the early ninth to the fifteenth centuries, as a companion to many different texts: from schoolbooks, to biblical glossaries, and from encyclopedias to treatises on computus (and canon law, sometimes!). Bruno argues that this work appealed to a broader and more engaged readership than previously recognised. Using newly identified manuscript evidence from the ninth to twelfth centuries, he demonstrates that the text could adapt to different intellectual settings of the early and high Middle Ages, transitioning from marginalia to an integral component of main texts. In this expansive Open Access article, Bruno pays close attention to the placement of the text in codices and to the text’s transmission history, revealing the sociocultural significance of prognostic texts such as the Sortes Sanctorum within the context of medieval knowledge systems.
Bruno Schalekamp, ‘“These Lots Never Deceive”: Compiling and Reading the Latin Manuscripts of the Sortes sanctorum’, Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies 11.1 (2026), pp. 36-101. (https://doi.org/10.1353/mns.2026.a990232)
