One of the better uses of a university homepage was always this: find some obscure historical subject that almost nobody else has explained online and quietly build the page yourself.
Visit An Introduction to Medieval Geomancy
Elizabeth Bennett’s Princeton site does that for medieval geomancy, a form of divination with roots in the medieval Islamic world that later became popular in Europe.
The subject is easy to confuse with modern uses of the word “geomancy,” especially feng shui. Bennett’s page is specifically about the divinatory practice that moved into Western Europe during the Middle Ages and remained in use into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
A small scholarly web project with actual depth
The site includes a step-by-step explanation of how geomancy was practiced, an annotated bibliography, and a complete transcription of Robert Turner’s 1655 English translation of a geomantic text attributed to Agrippa.
Bennett explains that her interest began while reading John North’s work on Chaucer, where geomancy appears in connection with medieval literature.
That origin gives the site a particularly old-web academic shape.
It is not trying to become the definitive commercial destination for occult history. It is a scholar making notes public, linking sources, transcribing material, and leaving enough structure that another researcher can follow the trail.
The page explicitly describes itself as a work in progress and says that medieval geomancy had received relatively little scholarly attention compared with better-known predictive systems such as astrology.
That makes the site useful in two directions.
It teaches the historical practice itself, but it also preserves evidence of how humanities scholars used personal university web space before institutional content systems flattened everything into standardized faculty profiles.
The copyright line dates the page to 1998, with later revisions extending the project without erasing its original form.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes university-hosted personal pages because many of them contain exactly this kind of material: narrow, serious, independently organized, and difficult to replace with a generic institutional page.
Geomancy survived centuries in manuscripts.
Then somebody gave it a home directory.