Medieval Divination by Unexpected Incidents: The Tabula prenostica Salomonis

Abstract

This article explores a little-known prognostic table, the so-called Tabula Salomonis, in its four oldest Latin manuscript witnesses from between ca. 1000 and 1300. Unusually for Latin prognostic texts, the table employs unexpected incidents such as animal sounds, sneezes, and bodily twitches combined with the signs of the zodiac as its starting point. Interestingly, the sources for the Tabula, a series of Late Antique texts from which the author “picked and mixed,” are not extant in Latin. Given a parallel tradition in Arabic, the authors argue that the Tabula’s direct precursor is not a Greek text (as is the case for many contemporary prognostic texts in Latin), but an Arabic work. This would make it the earliest attested prognostic text translated directly from Arabic into Latin.