Mistaking Revelations. On the Deceptive Nature of Prophecies, Visions, Divinations

For a paper about mistaking revelation there is no better starting point than Shakespeare’s Macbeth, as it contains all the elements we allude to in our title: prophecies, visions, divinations. Each of these fields are very well represented inside medieval texts and all of them show how errors in interpretations can be awfully common. Revelations that occur through prophecies, visions and divinations have to be treated carefully, as they can be a manifestation of the devil, as shown by many Chronicles (Giovanni Villani’s Nuova Cronica or Salimbene de Adam’s Cronica have plenty of these cases); also, misinterpretations may occur when someone is lacking the right kind of knowledge, as it happens for Gabriotto in Boccaccio’s Decameron.