Overview
- Professor Christian Tornau discovered the two sermons while deciphering six homilies in a 12th-century manuscript held in Pelplin, Poland in 2024.
- Both texts focus on 1 Samuel 28, the episode of Saul and the Witch of Endor, and argue that the medium had no real power and that any appearance of Samuel would have been permitted by God.
- Approximately 20 Latin specialists convened in Vienna in autumn 2025 and, according to the research team, unanimously judged the sermons to be authentic based on language, style, and manuscript evidence.
- The manuscript can be linked to Bad Doberan Abbey but its full transmission is uncertain because an older library catalogue that might confirm an Amelungsborn exemplar was lost in the Thirty Years' War.
- The team plans a critical edition by the end of 2026 that will publish the texts, place them in Augustine's corpus, and let scholars reassess medieval readings of prophecy, magic, and divine agency.