In all religions, in the medieval West as in the East, ideas about the past, the present and the future were shaped by expectations related to the End. The volumes Cultures of Eschatology explore the many ways apocalyptic thought and visions of the end intersected with the development of pre-modern religio-political communities, with social changes and with the emergence of new intellectual and literary traditions.
The two volumes present a wide variety of case studies from the early Christian communities of Antiquity, through the times of the Islamic invasion and the Crusades and up to modern receptions, from the Latin West to the Byzantine Empire, from South Yemen to the Hidden Lands of Tibetan Buddhism. Examining apocalypticism, messianism and eschatology in medieval Christian, Islamic, Hindu and Buddhist communities, the contributions paint a multi-faceted picture of End-Time scenarios and provide their readers with a broad array of source material from different historical contexts.
The first volume, Empires and Scriptural Authorities, examines the formation of literary and visual apocalyptic traditions, and the role they played as vehicles for defining a community’s religious and political enemies. The second volume, Time, Death and Afterlife, focuses on key topics of eschatology: death, judgment, afterlife and the perception of time and its end. It also analyses modern readings and interpretations of eschatological concepts.
Author(s): Veronika Wieser, Vincent Eltschinger, Johann Heiss
Series: Cultural History of Apocalyptic Thought / Kulturgeschichte der Apokalypse
Publisher: De Gruyter
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 864
City: Oldenburg
9783110597745
9783110597745
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors, volume 1
Notes on Contributors, volume 2
Cultures of Eschatology, volume 1. Empires and Scriptural Authorities in Medieval Christian, Islamic and Buddhist Communities
Introduction: Approaches to Medieval Cultures of Eschatology
Literary and Visual Traditions
Making Ends Meet: Western Eschatologies, or the Future of a Society (9th–12th Centuries). Addition of Individual Projects, or Collective Construction of a Radiant Dawn?
Apocalyptic Literature – A Never-Ending Story
“When the Sun is Shrouded in Darkness and the Stars are Dimmed” (Qurʾan 81:1–2). Imagery, Rhetoric and Doctrinal Instruction in Muslim Apocalyptic Literature
Volatile Images: The Empty Throne and its Place in the Byzantine Last Judgment Iconography
Appendix
On some Buddhist Uses of the kaliyuga
Scriptural Traditions and their Reinterpretations
Choices – The Use of Textual Authorities in the Revelation of John
Manichaean Eschatology: Gnostic-Christian Thinking about Last Things
The Third Latin Recension of the Revelationes of Pseudo-Methodius – Introduction and Edition
Appendix: Cinzia Grifoni, cur., Pseudo-Methodius’ Revelationes in the so-called Third Latin Recension
Eschatological Relativity. On the Scriptural Undermining of Apocalypses in Jewish Second Temple, Late Antique and Medieval Receptions of the Book of Watchers
Empires and Last Days 1
Eschatologies of the Sword, Compared: Latin Christianity, Islam(s), and Japanese Buddhism
The Portents of the Hour: Eschatology and Empire in the Early Islamic Tradition
The History of Ibn Ḥabīb: al-Andalus in the Last Days
Apocalyptic Insiders? Identity and Heresy in Early Medieval Iberia and Francia
Apocalyptic Cosmologies and End Time Actors
Treasure Texts on the Age of Decline: Prophecies Concerning the Hidden Land of Yolmo, their Reception and Impact
Gog and Magog Crossing Borders: Biblical, Christian and Islamic Imaginings
Zaydī Theology Popularised: A Hailstorm Hitting the Heterodox
Political Propheticism. John of Rupescissa’s Figure of the End Times Emperor and its Evolution
Death and Last Judgment
Death and Eschatological Beliefs in the Lives of the Prophets according to Islam
Scattered Bones and Miracles – The Cult of Saints, the Resurrection of the Body and Eschatological Thought in the Works of Gregory of Tours
Arguing for Improvement: The Last Judgment, Time and the Future in Dhuoda’s Liber manualis
Death and Pollution as a Common Matrix of Japanese Buddhism and Shintō
Afterlife and Otherworld Empires
Apocalypse Now? Body, Soul and Judgment in the Christianisation of the Anglo-Saxons
The Evolution of the Buddhist Otherworld Empire in Early Medieval China
Space and Power in Byzantine Accounts of the Aerial Tollhouses
The End of the End: Devotion as an Antidote to Hell
Empires and Last Days 2
The Multiple Uses of an Enemy: Gog, Magog and the “Two-Horned One”
A.D. 672 – The Apex of Apocalyptic Thought in the Early Medieval Latin West
Exegesis, Empire and Eschatology: Reading Orosius’ Histories Against the Pagans in the Carolingian World
The Bede Goes On: Pastoral Eschatology in the Prologue to the Chronicle of Moissac (Paris BN lat. 4886)
The Afterlife of Eschatology
The Testament of Time – The Apocalypse of John and the recapitulatio of Time according to Giorgio Agamben
Eschatology as Occidental Lebensform: The Case of Jacob Taubes
History beyond the Ken: Towards a Critical Historiography of Apocalyptic Politics with Jacob Taubes and Michel Foucault
Index
Proper Names
Geographical Names and Toponyms
