Last Things

by Bynum, Caroline Walker; Freedman, Paul

• ISBN13: 9780812217025
• ISBN10: 0812217020
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-01-01
• Publisher: Univ of Pennsylvania Pr

Summary

When the medievals spoke of "last things" they were sometimes referring to events, such as the millennium or the appearance of the Antichrist, that would come to all of humanity or at the end of time. But they also meant the last things that would come to each individual separately--not just the place, Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory, to which their souls would go but also the accounting, the calling to reckoning, that would come at the end of life. At different periods in the Middle Ages one or the other of these sorts of "last things" tended to be dominant, but both coexisted throughout. InLast Things, Caroline Walker Bynum and Paul Freedman bring together eleven essays that focus on the competing eschatologies of the Middle Ages and on the ways in which they expose different sensibilities, different theories of the human person, and very different understandings of the body, of time, of the end. Exploring such themes as the significance of dying and the afterlife, apocalyptic time, and the eschatological imagination, each essay in the volume enriches our understanding of the eschatological awarenesses of the European Middle Ages.

Author Biography

Caroline Walker Bynum is Professor of Medieval History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She is the author and editor of numerous books, including The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, and Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond, winner of the Award for Excellence in the Historical Study of Religion from the American Academy of Religion. Paul Freedman is Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of various articles and books, including Images of the Medieval Peasant and The Origins of Peasant Servitude in Medieval Catalonia.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
The Significance of Dying and the Afterlife
Settling Scores: Eschatology in the Church of the Martyrs	p. 21
The Decline of the Empire of God: Amnesty, Penance, and the Afterlife from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages	p. 41
From Jericho to Jerusalem: The Violent Transformation of Archbishop Engelbert of Cologne	p. 60
From Decay to Splendor: Body and Pain in Bonvesin da la Riva's Book of the Three Scriptures	p. 83
Apocalyptic Time
Time Is Short: The Eschatology of the Early Gaelic Church	p. 101
Exodus and Exile: Joachim of Fiore's Apocalyptic Scenario	p. 124
Arnau de Vilanova and the Body at the End of the World	p. 140
Of Earthquakes, Hail, Frogs, and Geography: Plague and the Investigation of the Apocalypse in the Later Middle Ages	p. 156
The Eschatological Imagination
Community Among the Saintly Dead: Bernard of Clairvaux's Sermons for the Feast of All Saints	p. 191
Heaven in View: The Place of the Elect in an Illuminated Book of Hours	p. 205
The Limits of Apocalypse: Eschatology, Epistemology, and Textuality in the Commedia and Piers Plowman	p. 233
Notes	p. 257
List of Contributors	p. 357
Index	p. 359
Acknowledgments	p. 365
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved.