and an associate editor for the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Medieval Women’s Writing in the Global Middle Ages.
Lazikani applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Medieval Moon: A History of Haunting and Blessing, and reported the following:
If you open The Medieval Moon: A History of Haunting and Blessing at page 99, you will find a discussion of how surgical practice was influenced by the position of the moon. I discuss the works—or adaptations of works— by authors and surgeons such as Lanfranc (c. 1250-1315) and John Arderne (b. 1307), who stress the importance of knowing the moon’s position when undertaking surgical treatment.Learn more about The Medieval Moon at the Yale University Press website.
This gives us a glimpse into the deep significance of the moon to medieval people: knowing about the moon and its position in the heavens even impacted healing practices. But because there was such a rich range of ideas about and attitudes towards the moon in the medieval world, page 99 can only indicate one aspect of the moon’s significance. The Medieval Moon explores a spectrum of ways in which the moon was important to medieval people: from its impacts on the tides and the growth of trees to its role as a place of adventure to its resonance for people in love. Its role in surgical treatment is only one dimension to its significance.
There is also another problem with attempting to see page 99 as representative of the whole book. The sources discussed there are in English. And The Medieval Moon seeks to take a global perspective of the medieval world, discussing sources in a range of different languages and from many parts of the world. The book does not do so perfectly, but this is its goal. Page 99 thus gives us only a fraction of the global perspective the book embraces.
In sum, I think page 99 offers us only a partial and fragmented view of what the moon meant to medieval people around the world.
--Marshal Zeringue
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