Everyone knows that life in later medieval England was somewhat chaotic and uncertain. First there was the plague, followed by popular uprisings, religious reform movements, and then two different wars threatening upheaval in the lives of ordinary English people—not to mention the regular calamities of illness, injury, or bad weather that often struck unexpectedly. This talk explores a set of unusual astrological and medical manuscripts created in later fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, which shed light on how ordinary English people navigated the uncertainty of life in the later Middle Ages. These practical books contain pictures for predicting the future, which, Dr Reynolds argues, capitalized on the medieval belief that patterns within the divinely-ordered universe could be comprehended and anticipated, if only one knew how to read them.

Dr. Melissa Reynolds is a historian of later medieval and early modern European medicine and science, with research interests in the history of material texts and the history of the body in relation to its environment. She is an Assistant Professor in the History department at Texas Christian University and was formerly a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows at Princeton University and the Wolf Humanities Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book, Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2024, was awarded the John Ben Snow Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies, and the William H. Welch Medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine. She is currently at work on a new project, exploring the relationship between commerce, environment, and conceptualizations of the body in later medieval and early modern England.

In 2013, Dr. Reynolds won a Schallek Award from the Richard III Society-American Branch while she was working on her PhD at Rutgers University in New Jersey.