Abstract
The pleasures of heaven in Renaissance thought : a little known chapter of Christian history In "Heaven : A History" (New Haven : Yale University Press, 1988), Colleen McDonnell and the author have distinguished two answers to the question of what eternal life will be like in heaven. For the Middle Ages, eternal happiness consisted in the vision of God. Between the 14th and the 16th centuries, Renaissance poets, painters, and bold theological thinkers created a more human alternative whose elements they found in Cicero and Tibullus. The present essay uses an early sixteenth-century engraving to highlight the four characteristics of the Renaissance heaven : its twofold structure as paradise and God's celestial realm, the saints' possibility to travel, the paradise garden as bucolic landscape, and the meeting of the beloved partner.
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