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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 May 2024
There are yet some among the Romans guilty of a superstition, which argues them not fully clear’d from the Augural humour of their Ancestors. These discover such an excess of weakness, as, by a kind of Onomancy, to search out of the names of the Cardinals some conjectures of their elevation; and this out of a persuasion, that a subject, who shall not have in the name of his house the letter R. when the deceas’d Pope had not the said Letter in the name of his House, will hardly be chosen Pope; and on the other side, that if the said deceas’d Pope had the said letter in the name of his House, the Cardinal who shall in like manner have it in his, can hardly be advanc’d to the Papacy; by reason of an alternate succession of the names of Families, having, and not having the said letter R. which hath been observ’d to have happen’d without interruption during about fourteen Exaltations to the Papal Chair.
John Davies (1625–93), a translator from Kidwelly, west Wales, published The New Pope in several editions from 1671, a translation of Gregorio Leti's (1630–1701) satirical account of papal elections, Il ceremoniale historico, part 5. This treatise ridicules the process of papal elections by claiming that superstitions, including ‘a kind of onomancy’, are involved in this process. Leti, an Italian who converted to Calvinism, was an irredeemable satirist who produced a significant number of works criticising and lampooning the Catholic church. Even satirically, then, onomancy – or something resembling it, since the process described here does not convert letters to numbers and perform calculations – was linked to the superstitions of the Catholic church in post-Reformation Britain.
This chapter will look beyond the arbitrary end of the Middle Ages and examine onomancy in Britain during the period c. 1500–c. 1700. I address several questions. What kinds of people owned, copied or used onomancies in early modern Britain? What effect, if any, did the Protestant Reformation and rise of witchcraft prosecutions have on condemnations of and justifications for the use of onomancy? What was the effect of print culture on the text and contexts of onomantic devices? Was onomancy as popular as it had been in the fifteenth century?
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