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

2015, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies

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