“Pricking in Virgil”: Early Modern PropheticPhronesisand theSortes Virgilianae (original) (raw)

Abstract

In John Aubrey's account of King Charles I's visit to London in 1648, the king, looking for a way to pass the time, decides to consult the Virgilian lots. After thrusting a pin between the pages of the Aeneid, he opens the book and reads out the verses he lands on, thereby submitting himself to the prophecy they contain. This bibliomantic practice of turning to Virgil's epic as a source of prophecy dates back to late antiquity and was, as far as we can tell, widely known in the Renaissance. While scholars have explored the sortes Biblicae and other practices of divination involving books in the early modern period, less has been said about the sortes Virgilianae, or the "Virgilian lots." 1 Moreover, extant scholarship on the practice tends to situate it within the context of Virgil's magical and prophetic status, without addressing the gesture whereby the seeker confronts the medium of the book, cutting into, excerpting out of, and transferring prophetic powers to the physical object itself. 2 In what follows I analyze early modern accounts of the sortes Virgilianae to underscore the role played by the medium of the book. 3 I argue that the practice is emblematic of an early modern mode of reading that is fragmentary and treats texts as objects to be cut up, displaced, and reaffixed in new contexts. The sortes Virgilianae are in some ways typical of humanist pragmatic reading, which mines a text for knowledge to be excerpted and applied. But they simultaneously resist this mode of reading by their reliance on the prophetic gesture whereby the text itself has agency over the reader's fate. As I will demonstrate, drawing on insights from scholars who have worked on the history of the book and the history of reading (Anthony Grafton, Lisa Jardine, and William Sherman, among others), the sortes Virgilianae conform to a practice of reading that involves cutting up and commonplacing. 4 At the same time, however, they resist this approach by their commitment to sacred and prophetic knowledge. Indeed, the sortes entail a type of reading

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References (7)

  1. Usher / "Pricking in Virgil" 571
  2. Marvell, The rehearsal transpros' d, or, Animadversions upon a late book intituled, A preface, shewing what grounds there are of fears and jealousies of popery (London: A. B. for John Calvin and Theodore Beza, 1672), 88.
  3. See, for example, Lisa Jardine and William Sherman, "Pragmatic Readers: Knowl- edge Transactions and Scholarly Services in Late Elizabethan England," in Religion, Culture, and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson, ed. Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 102 -24; and Jardine and Grafton, "Studied for Action," 30.
  4. Jardine and Grafton, "Studied for Action," 30, 35.
  5. Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth- Century England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 4.
  6. Ann Blair, "Humanist Methods in Natural Philosophy: The Commonplace Book," Journal of the History of Ideas 53, no. 4 (1992): 541 -51, esp. 542.
  7. Bradin Cormack and Carla Mazzio, Book Use, Book Theory: 1500 -1700 (Chicago: University of Chicago Library, 2005).