Each paper will take approximately twenty minutes, leaving approximately twenty minutes for a demonstration segment, during which participants will perform a series of sortes. Following the lead of the recent online "Spenser at Random" events hosted by the International Spenser Society, our demonstration aims to provide some hands-on (and, ideally, fun) experience of the phenomenon we are exploring. This will leave about fifteen minutes for discussion and question and answer.

Matthew Gumpert’s paper, “‘Take it and read’: Augustine as Bibliomancer” considers Augustine’s famous conversion, narrated in his Confessions, as a lesson in what he calls “catastrophic hermeneutics.” Conversion in the West, he argues, takes the form of a cognitive catastrophe: a violent, instantaneous rupture with a prior epistemological condition, effected not by the subject who suffers it, but a force (i.e., grace) external to that subject. The crucial mechanism marking the epistemological catastrophe that is conversion for Augustine is bibliomancy: when the sudden intervention of a disembodied voice directs him not simply to read Scripture, but to read it accidentally, Augustine narrates, having earlier consulted Paul’s Epistles,“I seized it and opened it, and in silence I read the first passage on which my eyes fell.” As bibliomancer, Augustine inscribes himself in a venerable tradition of catastrophic reading, one which plays a significant role in both classical and Judeo-Christian culture. Far from being antithetical to hermeneutics, Gumpert maintains, these catastrophic shortcuts constitute strategies for authorizing the interpretive process: if the sacred text is infinitely referable, bibliomancy is a way of arresting the referential process. Bibliomancy is thus the mode of authoritative (i.e., catastrophic) truth; the bibliomancer interrupts the text, provokes the sacred, sets off the explosive accident of truth. Bibliomancy teaches us that hermeneutics is both a form of reading as revelation (the accident of epiphany), and revelation as reading (the labor of exegesis).

Gabriel Bloomfield’s and Thomas Ward’s co-authored paper extends Gumpert’s discussion of Augustinian sortes in order to explore what they call “the ends of bibliomancy”: specifically, the question of where practitioners might choose to curtail their reading from a providentially chosen passage. Augustine’s note that he “read no further, nor needed” from the biblical text that precipitated his conversion, they argue, figures importantly in later literary representations of acts of reading associated with conversion, although in the two instances they discuss--from Dante’s Inferno and Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus--the conversion in question results in the bibliomancers’ damnation rather than their salvation. When Dante meets the lovers Paolo and Francesca in the second circle of Hell, Francesca echoes Augustine, concluding her narrative by telling how she and her lover “read no further” after encountering the “soft passage” from a French romance that seduced them into their illicit love for one another. The magician Faustus similarly breaks off his reading at a crucial point when performing what could be understood more explicitly as sortes sanctorum (using the Bible) in the first scene of Marlowe’s play: reading only the first half of Romans 6.23, Faustus’s musing over the Pauline stipulation that “the wages of sin is death”--but without the promise of “eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” that comes in the second half of the verse--leads him to bid “Divinity, adieu” and give himself over fully to his “necromantic books.” Attending to the various ways in which formal and paratextual features of texts attempt to determine where reading begins and ends, Bloomfield and Ward interpret these these instances from Dante and Marlowe as cautionary tales about the dangers of relying on one’s own divinatory instincts in deciding when to “read no further.”