dyeing, tailoring, architecture, mining, alchemy, weaponry, fortifications, travel and navigation, horticulture, agriculture, hunting, veterinary medicine, forestry, medicine, and surgery), and the magical or forbidden arts (geomancy,
chiromancy, necromancy, charms, witchcraft, etc.), but whereas Assion surveyed all this in 169 pages, Haage/Wegner take 289.
In his book The Art of the Renaissance in Northern Europe, Otto Benesch sets Altdorfer in his historical context and relates his landscapes to the theories of his contemporary Paracelsus: 'Paracelsus called the art of interpretation of nature "
chiromancy"' (that is, palmistry: the art of reading a person's character from the markings on his or her palms).
My favorite is Rule IX: "All books and writings dealing with geomancy, hydromancy, areomancy, pyromancy, oneiromancy,
chiromancy, necromancy, or with sortilege, mixing of poisons, augury, auspices, sorcery, and magic arts are absolutely repudiated." You may want to consult your dictionary on any of these subjects.
Grounded in the popularity of
chiromancy in the nineteenth century, Godfrey proposes, "[t]he thematic imbrication of reading hands and writing hands further activated the Romantic confusion of the subject perceiving and the object perceived; for the same hand that might signify the object of reading simultaneously implicated the writing subject.
Cardano himself, indeed, explored many of the more traditional forms, including astrology, geomancy and
chiromancy. Against a background of religious division and growing opposition to the papacy, Italy was racked by instability and turmoil, while the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and Francis I of France fought a series of wars over supremacy on Italian soil, in which the fortunes of the peninsula's city-states rose and fell with rapidity.
Especially the use of "practices and speculations" of alchemy, astrology or
chiromancy in the constitution of the symbology underlying Maria de Franca's story, the purpose of which is to give it cosmic reverberations.
