A Companion to Popular Apocalypticism in the High and Late Middle Ages

Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-90-04-52713-3
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 108, 306 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm

Reihe: Brill's Companions to the Christian Tradition

The many crises of the high and late Middle Ages in Europe saw a resurgence of interest in apocalypticism and millenarianism. Pious Christians who feared the coming judgement day but found the established Church lacking in an adequate response, sought out leadership and direction from thinkers who appealed to their lived experience. In this volume, we examine how this eschatology was interpreted, expressed, and disseminated in popular culture by a variety of lay religious movements and individuals such as the Order of Apostles, Bianchi, Guglielmites, Wycliffites, and Hussites among others. The authors here focus on how this creative response to apocalypticism reflected the changing social and political culture of medieval Europeans and is intended to illuminate the active exchange of popular and elite religious culture in the era.

Contributors include: Sally M. Brasher, Steven A. Hackbarth, Eleanor Janega, Stephen Lahey, Richard Landes, Alexandra R.A. Lee, Lucie Mazalová, Jerry B. Pierce, and Sergio Sancho Fibla.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Brasher, Sally Mayall

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations

Abbreviations

Notes on Contributors

Introduction Sally M. Brasher

1 The Apocalyptic Year Thousand: Demotic Religiosity and the Birth of Europe Richard Landes

2 From Acceptance to Annihilation: Poverty, Apocalypticism, and the Appeal of the Order of Apostles Jerry B. Pierce

3 A Partial Apocalypse? Eschatology and the Bianchi Devotions of 1399 Alexandra R.A. Lee

4 The Feminine Divine: Millenarian Interpretation by the Guglielmites Sally M. Brasher

5 Apocalypticism in the Age of Wyclif Steven A. Hackbarth

6 Antichrist in Prague Eleanor Janega

7 Apocalypticism in Bohemia after 1400: Violence and the Eschaton Stephen Lahey and Lucie Mazalová

8 Listening to John, Rewriting the Book: a Liturgical Reading of Constança de Rabasten’s Revelations Sergi Sancho Fibla

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Sally M. Brasher, Ph.D., is Professor of History at Shepherd University. Her research focuses on religion in the urban environment of medieval Italy and gender in the Middle Ages. Published works include the books, Women of the Humiliati: A Lay Religious Order in Medieval Civic Life (Routledge, 2003), and Hospitals and Charity: Religious Culture and Civic Life in Medieval Northern Italy (Manchester University Press, 2017), as well as essays on medieval Italian women religious and gender pedagogy.