Apocalyptic Cultures in Medieval and Renaissance Europe

Politics and Prophecy

Edited by Jay Rubenstein Edited by Robert Bast

Book cover: Apocalyptic Cultures in Medieval and Renaissance Europe

Extent: 301, 301 pages

Publisher: Brepols Publishers

Subjects: Early Modern & Renaissance Studies, Medieval Studies

Series: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Series volume number: 3

Language: English

Hardback (Published)

(May 2024)

ISBN: 9782503606699

Price: $113.00

In stock

Offers new readings of medieval and Renaissance Apocalypticism as the expression of spiritualities that informed both debate and practice, covering subjects as diverse as warfare, pilgrimage, gender, cartography, environmentalism, and governance. From papers presented at the 2020 Symposium, ‘Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Cultures i


The essays in this collection were presented at the 2020 Symposium on Apocalypticism, sponsored by the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Tennessee. The authors offer new readings of medieval and Renaissance Apocalypticism in quotidian terms, not as ‘counterculture’ but as the pragmatic expression of spiritualities that informed both debate and practice, on subjects as mundane and diverse as warfare, pilgrimage, gender, cartography, environmentalism, and governance. Topics include the origins of imperial eschatology; reflections on cosmology and the fate of the earth; the fusion of history, prophecy, and genealogy; Joachite readings of the political landscape of Italy; the influence of the Great Schism on Burgundian art; eschatology and gender in pilgrimage literature; the late medieval interpretation of the Revelationes of Pseudo-Methodius; and the appropriation of apocalyptic tropes in the propaganda and policies of the German emperor Maximilian I. The essays that open and close this collection offer meditations on the enduring legacy of Apocalypticism by focusing on the events – pandemic, political unrest, and the proliferation of conspiracy theories manifest in both – that mark the historical era in which this symposium took place.

  • Edited by Jay Rubenstein
  • Edited by Robert Bast