The interest in the future and in methods of revealing it is a constant in history. As early as the third millennium bc, already sophisticated methods of interpreting the future were used in the Middle East, such as hieromancy, the prognostic interpretation of sacrificial material, particularly well known from Roman antiquity. The abundance of methods also remains a constant in history, outlasting all ideological upheavals. One of the achievements of the International Consortium for Research in the Humanities: Fate, Freedom and Prognostication, established in 2009 at the University of Erlangen (Bavaria), is to illustrate this again and again, especially for East Asia and Europe, through conferences and publications. It has now produced a comprehensive two-volume handbook, mainly written by staff and former Fellows, which presents numerous attempts to explore the future in the field of the three Abrahamitic religions in the medieval world. The editors convincingly point out that the development of the various prognostic approaches and methods can only be understood by taking into account the intensive exchange between representatives of the three religions, which could lead on all sides to the expansion as well as the profiling of their own agendas.

After the editors have discussed basic terms and concepts and given advice on the handbook's use, the tripartite work starts with overviews of the history of prognostication, presenting both antiquity and the early modern period and also addressing the pagan traditions among Celts, Germanic peoples and Slavs, before discussing Western and Eastern Christianity, Judaism and Islam in the medieval epoch. Pre-Islamic traditions do not play a role due to the research situation. The second part presents the central traditions and practices of prognostication in the Middle Ages. The first eight topics (eschatology and millenarianism, prophecy and visions, dream interpretation, mantic arts, astral sciences, medical prognostication, calendrical calculations, weather forecasting) are discussed in four steps: Western and Eastern Christianity are followed by Judaism and Islam. Only the ninth topic (quantifying risks) exclusively considers Western Christianity; the activity associated with it is assessed as fundamentally foreign to Islam, which is a particularly fascinating example of cultural differences dealt with in the handbook. Finally, the third part, filling the second volume, provides a repertoire of written sources and artefacts in forty-seven of the handbook's ninety-three chapters (all of them with a selected bibliography). These include thematically close chapters such as the revealing contributions on calendars, astronomical and Easter tables in Eastern (J. Lempire) and Western (P. Nothaft) Christianity, and the informative articles on astrology (criticism: S. Rapisarda; introductions: M. Gaida; mathematical instruments/medical plates in astrological medicine: J. Rodríguez-Arribas; Islamic mathematical astrology: M. Gaida; Renaissance debates: D. Canaris), on otherworld journeys (Jewish: M. Müller; Latin: A. Bihrer) and Islamic geomancy (texts: M. Melvin-Koushki; artefacts: G. M. Cooper, P. Schmidl). Particularly intriguing are surprising topics such as legal texts (Eastern Christianity: W. Brandes; Jewish: E. Kanarfogel), mirrors-of-princes (B. Yun) and Latin liturgical commentaries (M. Czock). The acknowledged sixty-three contributors from about a dozen academic disciplines consist of highly qualified post-docs such as P. Nothaft and J. Rodríguez-Arribas, established experts such as D. Engels, A. Holdenried and S. Rapisarda, and masters such as C. Burnett, W. Brandes and H. Möhring. Together they offer a fascinating tableau of prognostication in the Middle Ages. Besides the classic research fields of theology of history and political prophecy, they bring together a wealth of further perspectives and thus open them up to a wider scholarly audience.

As a desideratum for a second edition, it is suggested that necromancy – researched in recent decades, for example by R. Kieckhefer, but mentioned here only in passing – be presented in a separate chapter as a source genre. It would also enlighten the treatment of mantic alphabets to mention the historico-theological treatise De semine scripturarum, written in 1204/05 by Anonymus Bambergensis and received throughout Europe: it deduced for the first time from the graphic or phonetic character of a letter that of a century assigned to it and thus also first divided the course of history into centuries.

What is fundamentally unsatisfactory about this basic work, however, is that it offers no subject index, no register of autonymous, pseudonymous or anonymous works (with the exception of I. Telelis's absorbing essay on Eastern Christian weather forecasting), and no list of illustrations. In addition to the table of contents, there is merely a twenty-five-page index of names, which contains mainly personal names, but also some names of places and related institutions. There seems to have been no time for a final revision of this index of names: for example, John of Rupescissa (†1365) is listed only as an alchemist. But although he was immensely important for later alchemy, his influence as theologian of history was much more far-reaching. In his numerous historico-theological works, he processed most of the circulating prophetic literature. So the two pages mentioned in the index present on seven meagre lines Rupescissa fittingly as a theologian of history, but surprisingly not as an alchemist. He could also have been made fruitful for the handbook as an expert of necromancy and astrology. Even more so as the inventor of the eschatological vade mecum – worthy of its own chapter in the third part of the handbook – which aimed to enable the reader to survive the approaching apocalypse and became his most widely received work with various Latin and multiple vernacular versions. So, Rupescissa's entirely peripheral treatment in comparison to Joachim of Fiore and Petrus Johannis Olivi indicates that the handbook has an intellectual bias in matters of theology of history.

Incidentally, thanks to digitalisation, the lack of a convincing index concept is compensated for in a labour-intensive way by the use of the electronic edition of the handbook. Therefore, and despite some shortcomings, the handbook can be unreservedly recommended as pioneer work for every library and for everybody interested in the history of medieval prognostics due to the wealth of its perspectives and its broad overview and insights into wide areas of the specialist literature.