Last Things : : Death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages / / ed. by Caroline Walker Bynum, Paul Freedman.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Penn Press eBook Package Complete Collection
• MitwirkendeR: Backman, Clifford R.,; Brown, Peter,; Bynum, Caroline Walker,; Daniel, E. Randolph,; Freedman, Paul,; Gragnolati, Manuele,; Harrison, Anna,; Hudson, Benjamin,; Jung, Jacqueline E.,; Papka, Claudia Rattazzi,; Smoller, Laura A.,; Stahl, Harvey,; Straw, Carole,
• HerausgeberIn: Bynum, Caroline Walker,; Freedman, Paul,
• Place / Publishing House: Philadelphia : : University of Pennsylvania Press, , [2012]; ©2000
• Year of Publication: 2012
• Language: English
• Series: The Middle Ages Series
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (376 p.) :; 17 illus.

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. In Last 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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction -- Part I: The Significance of Dying and the Afterlife -- Settling Scores: Eschatology in the Church of the Martyrs -- The Decline of the Empire of God: Amnesty, Penance, and the Afterlife from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages -- From Jericho to Jerusalem: The Violent Transformation of Archbishop Engelbert of Cologne -- From Decay to Splendor: Body and Pain in Bonvesin da la Riva's Book of the Three Scriptures -- Part II: Apocalyptic Time -- Time Is Short: The Eschatology of the Early Gaelic Church -- Exodus and Exile: Joachim of Fiore's Apocalyptic Scenario -- Arnau de Vilanova and the Body at the End of the World -- Of Earthquakes, Hail, Frogs, and Geography: Plague and the Investigation of the Apocalypse in the Later Middle Ages -- Part III: The Eschatological Imagination -- Community Among the Saintly Dead: Bernard of Clairvaux's Sermonsfor the Feast of All Saints -- Heaven in View: The Place of the Elect in an Illuminated Book of Hours -- The Limits of Apocalypse: Eschatology, Epistemology, and Textuality in the Commedia and Piers Plowman -- Notes -- List of Contributors -- Index -- Acknowledgments