ABSTRACT
Psalms and prayers, particularly the Pater Noster and Credo, offered an important link between religious practices and what we might call today popular superstition and ‘home remedies.’ This same impetus toward locating a link between the divine power and secular commonplace governs, in a very direct way, the entire miscellany of prefatory texts. In the depiction of the sphere in Cotton Vitellius E. xviii, fol. 16r (Plate 11), the numerical equivalents of the individual’s name are added together along with the age of the moon and divided by 30; the resulting number is then located in either the Vita section or the Mors section, thus revealing the outcome. The general arrangement of the texts comprising the prefatory matter leads a reader through a process of gradually narrowing and linked horizons, from a calendar and calculations of feasts and cycles, to the application of those calculations in concrete terms, to medicines and charms, and concluding with the text on secret writing.
