Le pratiche divinatorie nelle Meraviglie d’Oriente: la figura dei donestri

In the literary space of Old English documentation, the treatise known as Wonders of the East deals with the representations of everything that Anglo-Saxon society perceived as completely foreign, the Other posited in the Elsewhere. Within these descriptions the dimension of magic seems to enter in a marginal but signifi cant way. In particular, besides the inserted fragment depicting the two sorcerers of the apocryphal Old Testament, Jamnes and Mambres, the hybrid race known as donestre is represented as a people of soothsayers. Their main feature is, eff ectively, the ability to guess the language of the people who visit them in order to better communicate, learn their trust and eventually killing them by eating them. The divinatory power, used for evil purposes, adds to the deceptive and anthropophagic nature of the donestre and it becomes a further determining element of monstrosity. This essay aims to investigate how the treatise establishes an association between these semi-human creatures, located beyond the edge of the known world, and the practitioners of magical arts, positioned on the fringes of the Anglo-Saxon community, while identifying the ways in which magic can be used as a characterizing element in the marginalization of the Other.