Abstract/Summary

This thesis takes the form of a historical and cultural narrative of the phenomenon of texts on brontology placed in English medical and scientific manuscripts, from the mid-thirteenth century to the first half of the sixteenth century. Brontology is the study of thunder, in practice it operates by offering sets of predictions for the year ahead when thunder events are heard, either during a calendar month or one of the twelve periods of the signs of the Zodiac. The majority of examples selected for this study date from the late-fourteenth century to the end of the fifteenth century with a few significant outliers. Brontology rarely appears alone in these manuscripts, so a close physical, codicological, and palaeographical examination of manuscript witnesses was carried out with analysis of wider textual contexts in which it is found. Many of these witnesses owe their survival to the present day to the broad scientific, medical and academic interests of antiquarians and collectors of the Early Modern period, for this study notably: Sir Kenelm Digby via his Oxford tutor Thomas Allen, Dr. John Caius, and Sir Hans Sloane. These people preserved them in their own collections from as early as the sixteenth century, which is concurrent with the end of the study period. The introduction to this thesis commences with a historiographical background to brontology as an entity and its later-medieval history and context. Following this, there is a detailed description of how this study was designed and the methodology devised for it.