Beneath the altar, the souls of the martyrs¹ cried indignantly for vengeance.² In the “terrible tribunal of [the] savior and master,”³ persecutors would find “no mercy” from God’s exacting justice.⁴ From a black abyss, a sulfurous fire blazed ingeniously: it could burn forever, but never consume its victims.⁵ The tables would be turned and insults would recoil upon the perpetrators. Martyrs would become triumphant victors, judging the very ones who had pronounced such brutal sentences upon them.⁶ Polycarp shook his fist, “Get out of here, godless heathens!”⁷ Tied to the stake, he warned, “You threaten me with a temporary fire...

In the first decade of the sixth century, Jacob, future bishop of Batnae in the region of Sarug, south of Edessa, described in a memre, a poetic homily, the manner in which the average parishioner might listen to a sermon:

When the preacher speaks of matters that concern perfection, it leaves him cold; when he tells stories of those who have stood out for their zeal for righteousness, his mind begins to wander. If a sermon starts off on the subject of continence, his head begins to nod; if it goes on to speak of sanctity, he falls asleep. But...

On the evening of Friday, November 7, 1225, the archbishop of Cologne was murdered. That surprise attack by a band of local noblemen left the city bereft of a charismatic, powerful, and decidedly controversial political and ecclesiastical leader. One year later the Cistercian monk Caesarius of Heisterbach, at the urging of the new archbishop Henry of Molenark, attempted to remedy the loss by composing a Vita of Engelbert, praising his deeds and ultimately proclaiming him a saint.¹ The text is an extraordinary document that contains lively narrative sequences, detailed accounts of political situations, and some remarkable theoretical wrestling with the...

Bonvesin da la Riva’s Book of the Three Scriptures is an eschatological poem that describes hell in the Black Scripture, Christ’s passion in the Red Scripture, and heaven in the Golden Scripture.¹ Enormous attention is given to the body within the whole text, which opens with contempt for the decay and rottenness of the earthly body and ends with triumphal praise of the splendor of the glorious body. In this essay I will analyze the meaning of the emphasis granted to the body in the poem and discuss the portrayal of Christ’s passion as the midpoint in the transformation of...

“Great fear fell among the men of Ireland before the feast of John [the Baptist] of this year [1096], until God spared [them] through the fastings of the successor of Patrick and of the clergy of Ireland besides.”¹ The panic of 1096 is a curious episode in Irish history, and this laconic statement in the contemporary chronicle known as the Annals of Ulster is one of its few records of society beyond the powerful princes and higher clergy. This cultural terror at the approach of a saintly festival that the Gaels believed to be a preview of the Day of...

When slaves sang this spiritual about Moses leading the people of Israel out of Egypt into the wilderness and Joshua leading them to the conquest of Canaan, they expressed their longing for freedom, for equality with their masters, and for a share in the prosperity of the United States. On January 1, 1863 Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves in those states that formed the Confederacy. On December 18, 1865, the thirteenth amendment abolished slavery. The fourteenth amendment with its “due process clause” was ratified on July 28, 1868. The slaves were liberated during and shortly after...

The prospect of Christ’s second coming can be terrifying. Even if the scenes described by John in Revelation do not represent the actual events of that day to come, there is little about the end that is not unsettling to contemplate. The terror results primarily, of course, from concern about our own fates or those of our loved ones. St. Augustine taught medieval Christians that no one—not even the most devout and blameless—can afford to be without fear when Judgment Day arrives: our fates have long been sealed, he proclaimed, and all we can do is to live...

Before the outbreak of the universal pestilence later known as the Black Death, according to a letter seen by the fourteenth-century chronicler Heinrich of Herford, a tremendous earthquake struck the Austrian region of Carinthia. In the same year, “fire falling from Heaven consumed the land of the Turks for sixteen days”; “it rained toads and snakes for several days,” by which many men perished; and “pestilence gathered strength” in many parts of the world.¹ Similarly, the chronicle of the Austrian monastery of Neuberg recorded both the Carinthia earthquake and disturbing phenomena associated with the initial outbreak of the plague “in...

Bernard is famed for the friendships he enjoyed. He pours out, in his sermons on saints as in his sermons on the Song of Songs, ardent expressions of longing and love for his brother and for other friends, living and dead, and one can find such expressions in his letters as well. A hunger to be remembered by his now dead brother infuses his lamentation on Gerard: “How I long to know what you think about me, once so uniquely yours,” Bernard writes. “Perhaps you still give thought to our miseries, now that you have plunged into the abyss of...

For the faithful in the later Middle Ages, the afterworld was not the place it used to be. It was larger and in many ways nearer. Although the bliss of heaven, which the righteous hoped to enjoy after the Last Judgment, was still the distant ideal, the living were increasingly occupied with the fate of the human soul on the long road between death and the general resurrection, with an intermediate stage in which purged souls could benefit from prayers recited in this world and in which the righteous already enjoyed the company of saints. This shift in interest, which...

That both Dante’s Commedia and Langland’s Piers Plowman are in some sense apocalyptic poems has been noted throughout their critical traditions, because both appropriate elements from the biblical Apocalypse, the Revelation to John, and include scathing critiques of secular and ecclesiastic powers, coupled with cryptic prophecies of millennial regeneration. While much work has carefully traced these allusions and attempted to decipher their historical and spiritual significance, less attention has been paid to the formal and narrative consequences of the use of apocalypse in these two poems.¹ In order to consider these literary or “authorial” aspects of apocalypse, it is useful...