Defining the Sortes Sanctorum : Gibbon, Du Cange, and Early Christian Lot Divination

Abstract

First mentioned in a fifth-century Gallic church council, the term sortes sanctorum ("lots of the saints") recurs throughout the Latin middle ages. Following Charles Du Cange's Glossarium . . . Latinitatis (1678), scholars have usually defined it either as a synonym for divinatory consultation of the Bible (sortes biblicae) or as a blanket label for all early Christian lot divination. This article argues instead that Sortes Sanctorum was the title of a divinatory text found in numerous manuscripts (incipit: "Post solem surgunt stellae"), which also appears under the title Sortes Apostolorum. The original setting of this text, its subsequent history and condemnation, and changing interpretations of its titles are then traced from the end of antiquity to the present, with special attention to Edward Gibbon's transmission of Du Cange's definition. Among other consequences, the rejection of this definition removes most of the evidence for the early church's condemnation of the sortes biblicae.

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