Professor Roy M. Liuzza Receives A Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Here is a description of his project, titled "Anglo-Saxon Prognostics: Texts and Studies":
"I am preparing the first modern edition and study of the corpus of Anglo-Saxon prognostics, a diverse group of over fifty Latin and Old English texts which forecast the outcome of everyday events such as birth, illness, weather and harvest, or noted good and bad days for bloodletting or the interpretation of dreams. Most of these texts originated in Greece but were translated into Latin at the end of the classical period; they are found in hundreds of medieval manuscripts but have received very little scholarly attention. Usually dismissed as 'superstition' or 'folklore,' they have never been studied in their manuscript context and their cultural milieu, the world of monastic science in which they were copied, collected, and translated. These texts give us fascinating new perspectives on monastic life, religious belief, medical theory and practice, the status of classical learning in the Middle Ages, the shifting boundary between orthodox faith and popular belief, and the complex interconnections in medieval thought between time, the heavens, and the human body."