Reading the Split Moon: Celestial Portents in Medieval Kerala and Scotland

Abstract

Stories about the splitting of the moon provide a basis for comparison across Latin monastic chronicles, Arabic Islamic narratives and Malayalam histories. The resemblances between these accounts emerge from distinct religious, political and institutional settings. In each context, a disturbance in the heavens becomes a way of articulating royal authority, moral order and communal self-understanding. Comparison here becomes an analytical problem to be handled with care rather than evidence of transmission. This approach makes it possible to read connected and disconnected histories together, without collapsing them into a single explanatory line. This article also shows how digital editions and collective reading practices render manuscript differences newly visible. They allow variation, disagreement and editorial choice to be traced across corpora and at scale. In doing so, they support a method of comparative medieval history that is disciplined in its handling of sources and transferable beyond the cases examined here.