Divination, Argument, and Evidence in Renaissance Scholarship

When a modern classical philologist praises a colleague’s “divination,” she normally refers to an ingenious conjectural emendation of a word or passage transmitted corruptly by all of the manuscripts--a restoration of something lost, made possible by the colleague’s knowledge of the ancient languages and the particular writer’s context. The term is laudatory. In the early Renaissance, by contrast, scholars treated divination as a last resort, a desperate effort to solve problems when the evidence was missing. Some even connected the divination practiced by philologists with the illegal and wicked art of divination supposedly practiced by magicians. In this paper, I will lay the ways in which scholars have used the term “divination” back to antiquity; explain why it posed such difficulties in the early Renaissance; and trace its gradual transformation in the language and practices of Erasmus and other humanist scholars.