Through the Body: Chiromancy in 17th-Century England

The early modernity inherited the ancient and medieval conviction that normally hidden knowledge about fellow humans could be obtained by an inspection of particular parts of their bodies. It was the hand that was considered especially informative, as it contained lines and other natural marks that were supposed to form a kind of alphabet that could disclose the “Inclinations, the Motions of the Soul, the Vertues and Vices”, and were even capable of revealing the examined person’s future. The present article explores the English boom in chiromancy in the 17th century, which saw new editions of old authorities as well as new treatises by, for instance, Richard Saunders and George Wharton, whose chiromantic texts aimed at elevating palmistry to the status of science that pursued the ancient nosce te ipsum philosophy. The striking feature of chiromancy was its preoccupation with the material and the bodily. Each chiromantic session was in fact a kind of symbolic dissection that consisted in identifying, naming and interpreting particular anatomical parts of the hand. Furthermore, palmists had to consider all unique physical attributes of their clients’ hands, whose varied size and shape – together with palm lines’ length, depth, colour, straightness or crookedness – always had to be taken into account. Chiromancy was thus founded on acknowledgment and contemplation of variety and changeability observable in the human bodies, which provided access to knowledge about humanity