Apocalyptic Time Research Articles

“Cauldron of Conspiracy”: Conspiratorial Tropes as Modes of Critique in Ḥabībī’s The Pessoptimist and Saʿdāwī’s Frankenstein in Baghdad

Abstract This article uses the concepts of “conspiracy” and “conspiracy theory,” along with their literary tropes, to theorize resistance to the colonial ideals of modernity in Israel and Iraq and to contest the oppressive developmental temporalities associated with this modernity. By analyzing Imīl Ḥabībī’s al-Mutashāʾil (The Secret Life of Saeed, the Pessoptimist, 1974) and Aḥmad Saʿdāwī’s Frānkishtāyn fī Baghdād (Frankenstein in Baghdad, 2013), I show how tropes of conspiracism and conspiratorial thinking are deployed in both of these novels to critique myths of linear progress—often used to justify the Israeli occupation and the U.S. invasion—despite the divergent historical periods and contexts out of which the two texts emerge. In their act of contestation, the novels leverage alternate temporalities in connection to conspiracism, such as the cyclical time of suffering and exploitation, or the apocalyptic time that offers release from said suffering through ending time altogether. Yet in both cases the tropes of conspiracy are ultimately shown to have little explanatory or emancipatory value and high human cost. Both novels thus thematize the analytic and critical limits of conspiracism.

A far cry from greatness: Christian fundamentalism, liberty porn and the ‘good people’ of Trump’s America in Far Cry 5

This article offers a close reading of Ubisoft’s Far Cry 5 (FC5) (2018) in the context of apocalyptic rhetorics and evangelical Christian nationalism during the Trump Era. Building upon my previous work with video game chronotopes (2021) and Sören Schoppmeier’s analysis of the retrotopic, ‘nostalgia time’ in the game (2022), I analyse the doubled temporality of nostalgia time and apocalyptic time as deployed spatially in the game in combination with the game’s wanton use of ‘liberty porn’: undisciplined appeals to liberty and freedom through narrative, iconography and cutscene to instil respect and favour for the largely imagined plights of the right-wing inhabitants of the game’s fictional Hope County. Drawing heavily on examples of right-wing violence, attacks on civil rights and Christian fundamentalism during the Trump Era, this article draws concerning parallels between FC5’s rhetorical achievement and Trump’s embrace of white supremacist narratives – like ‘replacement theory’ – and militia groups, fashioning them as ‘good people’, a rhetoric similarly deployed throughout the game. Ultimately, this article argues for more corporate responsibility among game studios when it comes to deploying right-wing narratives and a bolder refutation of such reactionary games by game studies scholars, especially when parodic value is limited or largely absent.

Time in the Works of F.M. Dostoevsky: Ontological and Anthropological Interpretations

The article analyzes the problem of time in the following works by F.M. Dostoevsky: the novel “Demons” and the novella “Notes from the Underground”. The main method of the article is anthropological analysis, which will help achieve the purpose of this study and show the connection between man and time. The author suggests moving away from the already familiar interpretation of time in the works of F.M. Dostoevsky, namely, to stop considering time as an ontological category and talk about eschatological and apocalyptic time or even about overcoming it. The study analyzes the views of N.A. Berdyaev, M.M. Bakhtin and V.A. Podoroga on this problem in the works of F.M. Dostoevsky, their shortcomings are revealed and an alternative, anthropological interpretation of time is proposed. It is, in our opinion, that is the closest to the truth in the space of F.M. Dostoevsky’s philosophical anthropology. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the fact that the author for the first time in the scientific literature substantiates the idea that time in the selected works of F.M. Dostoevsky appears only with a person, becomes a property of his conscious life and is not an ontological, but an anthropological category. A person becomes someone who lives in time because he is “chained to himself, looking inside his self” (F.I. Girenok). But at the same time, a person does not live in space, because he does not turn to what is outside of it. The closeness of a person in himself makes him a temporary, not a spatial being, which, in our opinion, was demonstrated by F.M. Dostoevsky.

“Life Would Never Feel This Good Again”: The Use of Pastiche in Edgar Wright’s The World’s End (2013)

This article explores the ways in which pastiche, the past, and national iden- tity are portrayed and navigated in the concluding film of Edgar Wright’s The Cornetto Trilogy: The World’s End (2013). By focusing on the relationship between the use of the past and pastiche, it will be considered how they are employed to negotiate the notion of national identity. Through its comedic strategies and tropes, the film rebels against a ho- mogenised version of Englishness based on mythical assumptions of the past and striving toward perfection. The dissection of the cinematic structure of pastiche will reveal a tem- poral framework questioning contemporary narratives of national identity. Moreover, the exploration of nostalgia and the past as places of retreat, as well as pastiche as a device of comedic criticism, enable Wright to offer a portrait of Englishness as struggling to recover its identity amidst a turbulent and apocalyptic time.

The lure of nothingness. Art and crisis of "presence" in Ernesto De Martino

In this paper an aesthetics is proposed based on the De Martino concept of “crisis of presence”. If one takes such a terrifying notion seriously a very different idea of art can be experienced, an art suited in the apocalyptic time of the “end of the world”. An art that can only begin when the fear for the non-human and materic in us is set aside.

Apocalyptic argumentation

AbstractOur time is an apocalyptic time, but the argumentation in this apocalyptic time has hardly been studied by scholars of argumentation. This article shows how both Donald Trump and the jihadist warriors of ISIS appeal to an apocalyptic worldview in their argumentation. The three topos of evil, time and authority from Stephen O’Leary’sArguing the Apocalypseare used in the analysis. Both Trump supporters and jihadist warriors see themselves as fighting for God and their enemies as representing evil forces. For scholars of argumentation the role of arguments woven into narratives that become whole worldviews needs to be studied more thoroughly.

Apocalyptic Time: Vegan Taxidermy, the Remains of Dolly the Sheep, and Bio-Engineered Art(ificiality) in the Time of Mass Species Extinction

ABSTRACT In this article, I complicate the ways that scientists and artists stage unique taxidermied animals. I look to what present-day taxidermy sculpture examples can teach us about human fears of extinction. Taxidermy has been repurposed in art galleries and is used to commemorate famous animals, such as ‘Dolly’, a cloned Finn Dorset sheep. I explore how taxidermy art can be used to theorize and think through anthropocentric apocalyptic time. In order to challenge artificial human notions of origins and ends, I place Dolly’s taxidermied remains in dialogue with Robert Marbury’s ‘vegan’ taxidermy sculpture of a woolly mammoth, made from discarded plush toys. Taxidermied Dolly (an animal that transcends ‘natural’ origins) and Marbury’s mammoth (a faux taxidermy piece that does not use real animal skin) blur boundaries – the real from the fake, the authentic from the gaff – and help us think through the temporal limits of human knowledge.

Revolution as herald of new bliss in early English romantic poetry

The idea that the Great French Revolution for the age of early English Romanticism is a signal for mankind to transition into a new era, into a new apocalyptic time of the end of human history, is considered established in modern literary studies. At the same time, such issues remain underdeveloped as the relationship between the images of the Golden Age, paradise regained, and New Jerusalem in the poetry of Elder English Romantic poets and the interpretation of modernity in its connection with the past in the context of a biblical myth. The search for answers to these two questions is the goal of this research. The study is conducted within the framework of comparative literary studies with elements of comparative cultural studies. The significant results include the ideas that the human history during the early poetry by Elder English Romantic poets is depicted as mankind’s transition from blissful primordial harmony of the unity of the person-in-love with nature and another person to the oppressed-divided internal (spiritual) and external (social and political) state and, finally, to the new external (free) and internal (spiritually harmonious) bliss. In this new image of human history, the biblical myth of the Last Judgment and the New Jerusalem is superimposed on the idea of the return of the Golden Age and, simultaneously, paradise lost, and is interpreted through enlightenment ideas and romantic philosophy and aesthetics. The Great French Revolution seems to be the precursor of not only the common longing for the new bliss but also the transformation of human nature on the way to returning to the righteous state of sacrificial love.

Postmodern pentecostalism: apocalyptic time in the paintings of Michael Stevenson

Postmodern pentecostalism: apocalyptic time in the paintings of Michael Stevenson

A Messianic Aesthetic: Lily Briscoe's Vision

This essay reads To the Lighthouse through the lens of Giorgio Agamben's Pauline conception of messianic time and suggests that we reconsider the genre of modernist novels in light of such a “messianic aesthetic.” Insofar as To the Lighthouse presents chronological time impregnated by apocalyptic time, it reveals a coinciding of chronos and the eschaton to produce “the time of the now.” Rather than compensate for loss (the dominant reading), Virginia Woolf's novel reflects Agamben's conception of time by situating salvation in the place of deterioration or the unsavable, celebrating caducity. Woolf presents a contraction of time, through the pulsating rays of the Lighthouse, that carries time to fulfillment and then falls back into potentiality/impotentiality. Lily's eventual embrace of her painting's inevitable destruction underscores the notion that creation and decreation are salvifically coextensive. On the political level, Lily's artistic vision neutralizes Mr. Ramsay's sovereignty by putting his linear journey to a new, playful use—a pure means without end. Given that Agamben laments the scission in the Western cultural tradition between philosophy and poetry, it seems germane that his theory be fleshed out through poetic art. Agamben reveals messianic temporality and its political effects in Woolf, just as Woolf's poetic prose gives to Agamben's ideas a representational bloom. By offering To the Lighthouse as a paradigm, this essay illustrates how Agamben's work may be used for literary interpretation—a brand-new and exciting area, as his writings have not yet been invoked to interpret literary texts.

Time - Whole - Openness Relation in Cinema and the Philosophy of Modern Cinema

The main question of this paper – how the forking of the time into three streams - the presence of the past, the presence of presence and the presence of the future which is possible to be reflected in the classical philosophy (Augustine, Leibnic, Bergson), in phenomenology (Husserl, MerleauPonty), in literature (Borges, Proust), is structuring itself in the cinema and in the philosophy of modern cinema. The article investigates some trajectories of this bifurcation: Tarkovsky‘s imprinted time, apocalyptic time and its turn into the crystals of time in the philosophy of cinema of Gilles Deleuze. Keywords: forking of time, imprinted time, crystals of time. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15823/zz.2014.028

“After the End Times”: Postcrisis African Science Fiction

We live in a moment of “apocalyptic time,” the “time of the end of time.” Ours is a moment of global ecological crisis, of the ever-impending collapse of capital. That we live on the brink is too clear. What is not, however, is our ability to imagine the momentafterthis dual crisis. In recent years, African artists have begun to articulate this “moment after,” ushering in a new paradigm in African literature and film that speculates upon postcrisis African futures. Writers and filmmakers such as Nigeria’s Efe Okogu and Kenya’s Wanuri Kahiu have imagined future African topographies—spaces that have felt the fullest effects of climate change, nuclear radiation, and the imbalances of global capitalism. Biopolitics, sovereignty, and the human have all been reconfigured in these African science fictions. Okogu and Kahiu’s futurist aesthetics are specters that loom over our present, calling for a radically reimagined politics of the now.

Apocalyptic Cycles in Don DeLillo's Underworld

Apocalyptic Cycles in Don DeLillo's Underworld

Works by Welty: A Continuing Checklist

Works by Welty: A Continuing Checklist Pearl A. McHaney Click for larger view View full resolution “Conversations with Charlotte Capers and Eudora Welty, August 1994.” Interview by Mae Miller Claxton. Eudora Welty Newsletter 32.2 (Summer 2008): 6–15. Cuentos completos (Collected Stories). Various translators. Barcelona: Lumen Editorial, 2009. 987 pages. “Eudora Welty and Walker Percy: The Southern Imagination.” Interview by William F. Buckley. Chesterton Review 35 (Spring/Summer 2009): 333–57. [Reprint from Mississippi Quarterly 26 (Fall 1973): 493–516] Eudora Welty as Photographer. Ed. Pearl Amelia McHaney. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2009. [i]–viii, [1]–96. Forty-three photographs by Welty ii, 2, 10, 27–66. Preface and Acknowledgments vi–viii. “The Observing Eye” by McHaney 3–24, “Eudora Welty and Photography” by Sandra S. Phillips 69–79, and “Eudora Welty: The Intrepid Observer” by Deborah Willis 81–84. Chronology [of Welty as photographer] 85–91. Index of Photographs 93–96. Occasions: Selected Writings. Ed. Pearl Amelia McHaney. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2009. [i]–xvii, [1]–350. Biographical Note xi–xii, Foreword xiii–xv, Acknowledgements xvii. I. Stories and Skits: Acrobats in a Park, [1935] 3–13; Introduction to Acrobats in a Park, 1980 14–16; The Doll, 1936 17–23; Magic, 1936 24–33; Retreat, 1937 34–40; Song of the Times, 1949 41–43; Bye-Bye Brevoort, 1949 44–54. II. Wit and Wisdom: Women!! Make Turban in Own Home!, 1941 57–63; Letters to Charles Shattuck regarding Ida M’Toy, 1942 64–70; Literature and the Lens, 1944 71–74; The Abode of Summer, 1952 75–78; A Flock of Guinea Hens Seen from a Car, 1957 79–80; Weddings and Funerals, 1979 81–84; Charles Dickens’s Eggnog, 1981 85–86. III. The Arts: José de Creeft, 1944 89–94; Chodorov and Fields in Mississippi, 1956 96–99; John Rood, 1958 100–02; [End Page 153] William Hollingsworth Show, 1958 103–05; On Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 1959 106–07; On Fairy Tales, 1963 108–11; Review of Martha Graham: Portrait of the Lady as an Artist by LeRoy Leatherman, 1967 112–17; Introduction, The Democratic Forest by William Eggleston, 1989, 118–23. IV. Underfoot Locally: A Ballad: The Fight between Governor Johnson and Fred Sullens, [1938] 127–29; From the Mississippi Women’s War Bonds News Letter, Club Issue, 1944 130–31; On the Lamar Life Insurance Company: A Salute from One of the Family, 1956 132–35; Books for Hospitals, Institutions, and Prisons, 1961 136–39; Preface: A Note on the Cook, 1976 140–42; Aunt Beck’s Chicken Pie, 1980 143–44; Jackson: A Neighborhood, 1982 145–50; A Note about New Stage, 1983 151–55; Jackson Communiqué, 1985 156–58. V. On Writers: Place and Time: The Southern Writer’s Inheritance, 1954 161–69; Tribute to Isak Dinesen, 1962 170; Tribute to Flannery O’Connor, 1964 171; Tribute to Allen Tate, 1979 172–73; Foreword, Self-Portrait: Ceaselessly into the Past by Ross Macdonald, 1981 174–78; Foreword, The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer, 1981 179–81; Foreword, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, 1981 182–87; Afterword, Novel Writing in an Apocalyptic Time by Walker Percy, 1986 188–90. VI. On Friends: Nash K. Burger Jr. of Jackson, Mississippi, 1974 193–200; Foreword, The Capers Papers by Charlotte Capers, 1982 201–03; Celebrating Reynolds Price, 1983 204–05; “That Bright Face is Laughing” for Robert W. Daniel, 1983 206–07; Tribute to Walker Percy, 1991 208–11; Introduction to Norton Book of Friendship, 1991 212–19. VII. Public Engagements: Voice of the People, Letter against Gerald L. K. Smith, 1945 223–24; Department of Amplification, Letter in defense of William Faulkner, 1949 225–28; What Stevenson Started, 1953 229–31; Is There A Reader in the House?, 1955 232–34; English from the Inside, 1966 235–42; From Where I Live, 1969 243–45; Opening Remarks, Governor’s Conference on the Arts: New Audiences/New Creators, 1974 246–49; Letter to the Editor of the New York Times Book Review in defense of The Surface of Earth by Reynolds Price, 1975 250–52; Introduction, Inaugural Papers of Governor William F. Winter, 1980 253–56; Prologue, Inauguration of Governor...

"Militant Expectations": Childhood's End and Millenarianism in Richard Powers' Operation Wandering Soul

I sent him my draft, to see if he might somehow be able to save it too from its inevitable end. My best intentions had failed to disperse the bleakness of the real. --Operation Wandering Soul Conclusion, then, is something Richard Powers would likely only come to in a beginning. But endings proceed inevitably from beginnings in Powers' estimation, making what has come before unavoidable and determinative. Best then to get the ending out the way first just in case we can outrun it. Against that backdrop, Powers doggedly tracks the exigent relationship among violence, the disappearance of childhood, and millenarianism in his novel Operation Wandering Soul, published in 1993. (1) With its mix of magical realist narrative devices (children who literally vanish or appear at different junctures of history) and social realist settings (the crumbling infrastructure of a dystopian Los Angeles), Powers' novel serves as a useful reference point for contemporary debates about violence, religion, and social welfare in America. In a sequence of moves, Powers also attempts to connect disparate cultures and eras by exploring the ways in which childhood is a social/historical construct. (2) But he also relentlessly situates the abuse of as a problem outside space and time; a foundational eschatology; the beginning and end of all narratives; and as a metanarrative that intertwines with the development, telling and effect of stories. Powers treats stories not only as inadequate to tell, but also as inextricable from their millenarian subject. cure is part of the disease; surgery would kill the patient. Set primarily in a children's hospital in a violent section of the city, the novel treats the status of children's wards as indices of the ultimate sickness and social trajectory of a society. Associating childhood story-telling with childhood illness and millennial decay, Powers reminds us that J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan bequest went to fund the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London (118). From his vantage in viewing sick and abandoned children, most of whom are orphaned, displaced or exiled, Powers' nearly pseudonymous narrator/protagonist, Doctor Richard Kraft, (3) situates history as a contest between abused children, or abused childhood, and the adults who have redefined childhood out of existence: Childhood is not that parade of vibrant kids teaching the world to sing. That's a new one: as far as [Linda] Espera has read, the product of the last fifty years. She knows the histories from school. Time was when domestic theory wrote the whole batch off as changeling babies, perversely truculent sub and semihumans. prescribed treatment was to beat the devils out of their tiny, ripe habitations. No wonder childhood is just waiting for her to turn around and leave the room so it can retaliate for the running lancet sores inflicted on it by ages of adulthood. (190) In this novel, childhood is under constant siege by adult violence: If the class [at the hospital] stayed amazingly sedate and violence-free throughout [the talk of the young Thai girl Joy], it is the stunned silence of islanders unable even to see the first-arrival masts on their horizon (33). These children of god are the latest generation to be colonized by a violent adult world: The traffic of juvenile misery drifting through his [emergency room] office begins to mirror the freeway's aimless lane changes.... disturbances out on the edge of the crumbling empire.... [Pediatrics] provides the quintessential, unexpurgated view of just where Western Civ's whole project is really headed in its third thousand years (347, 22). notation of Western civilization's third millenium encapsulates the apocalyptic time that governs the novel as a whole, and the waiting that Linda Espera--part physician/nurse/counselor, pretend believer in the story-cure, and as close to a love interest as Kraft comes to having--embodies in her name. …

Acerca del uso del tiempo apocalíptico en la Edad Media

After a first section in which the essential thesis of Reinhart Koselleck’s work Zeitverkurzung und Beschleunigung are synthesized, the text discusses some of its main conclusions. In the analysis is very important the reflection about the use of apocalyptic time in the Middle Ages. So, the paper criticizes the way the Christian Apocalypse is presented as profane acceleration, last consequence of secularization. The essay ends by breaking up the temporal sequence between reduction and acceleration, human action and divine action, the time of humans and the time of transcendence, which have indeed coexisted in a dialectical way.

“Talked to by Silence”: Apocalyptic Yearnings in Louise Glück's The Wild Iris

is easy, sir he said, obtain a suitable place, a garden, in which one can work without interference and grow with seasons. There can't be too many opportunities left any more. --Jerzy Kosinski, Being There In an interview given more than twenty years ago, Louise Gluck said: I've [...] felt temptation of Absolute as a danger; mysticism, spirituality out of which [...] my best poems will come, has in some ways to be fought. I tried--try--to introduce and reintroduce earthly, because my orientation is always toward eternal [...]. It has a powerful hold over me [...] absolute, eternal, immutable--that condition which does exist in physical world. (Descending Figure 119-20) And in her 1994 Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry, Gluck remarks: The impulse of our century has been to substitute earth for god as an object of reverence. This seems an implicit rejection of eternal. But religious mind, with its hunger for meaning and disposition to awe, its for path, continuum, unbroken line, for what is final, cannot sustain itself on matter and natural process. (21) Since beginning of her career, this craving for that which is immutable, caught in grip of the earthly, temporal, has been an obsession for Gluck. And in cast[ing] about for those situations, or myths, that will answer to that craving, Gluck has found some of her most memorable poems (Descending Figure 119). If anything, such an obsession, such a craving, has become more insistent in Gluck's work as time has gone on, and, I would argue, this obsession comes to climax in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Wild Iris (1992), where mutable and immutable merge in three powerful and visionary apocalyptic sequences. The Wild Iris is an extremely risky book. Essentially it consists of a trialogue of voices--God, poet, and flowers in poet's garden. The flowers provide a kind of arena and act as a kind of referee for between two primary protagonists, poet and God. The natural cycle of life, death, and resurrection in a garden thus becomes literal ground for and frame upon which this is carried out, while plants and flowers (pathetic fallacy with a vengeance) actively participate in discussion. The dominant dialogue, however, is carried on between divine and human protagonist/antagonist, and this dialogic discussion/ debate is stressed through structure of book, which is almost equally divided between two voices of these speakers. The itself centers on impossibility of any resurrection beyond human, earthly realm as in a garden. The poems spoken by poet-protagonist are best described--perhaps inevitably so given terms of setting and identity of antagonist--as prayers (or anti-prayers), and they are explicitly associated with Divine Office of canonical hours. Seven poems are titled Matins and ten Vespers. It is interesting that both matins, first of canonical hours, and vespers, penultimate hour in Divine Office, are prayers prayed in twilight hours. These two sequences, then, suggest beginnings and ends, ends and beginnings, placed in contexts of times in which natural illumination, literal light, is diminished, blurred, or blotted out. Brought together in such twilit times, these prayer-poems evoke typical apocalyptic time of a not yet, even if it is also a time prescient with what is nevertheless an inevitable end--an end vivid in vision but one that, paradoxically, one must survive. As I have suggested elsewhere, One of paradoxes of apocalyptic mode is that it is bound up with questions of temporality in general and [. …

What Happens when Jesus Doesn't Come: Jewish and Christian Relations in Apocalyptic Time

What Happens when Jesus Doesn't Come: Jewish and Christian Relations in Apocalyptic Time

Last Things: Death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (review)

Reviews 139 Bynum, Caroline Walker and Paul Freedman, eds, Last Things: Death and the Apocalypse in theMiddle Ages, Philadelphia, University ofPennsylvania Press, 2000; paper; pp. viii, 364; 18 b/w illustrations; R R P US$49.95, £37 (cloth), US$24.95, £18.50 (paper); ISBN 0812235126 (cloth), 0812217020 (paper). This collection of essays, one of many spawned by the recent millennial mome can be differentiated from others by its comprehensiveness. The 'Last Things' ofthe title were understood in the Middle Ages as death, judgment, heaven and hell. But as the editors explain in their useful introduction, eschatological thought was more complicated than such a simple four-fold division suggests. Accordingly, they substitute their o w n quadripartite description: 'death, the afterlife, the end of time (whether terrestrial or beyond earth), and theological anthropology or the theory ofthe person' (p. 1). Moreover, they suggest that none ofthese topics can be fully understood without reference to the others and hence that assembling essays on eschatological topics formerly studied in isolation, will have 'far-reaching implications'. However since none of the eleven essays can be confined to just one of their revised four categories they are arranged, in a process reminiscent of Joachim ofFiore's parallel explanatory schemes, according to a three-fold division: 'The Significance of Dying and the Afterlife'; 'Apocalyptic Time' and 'The Eschatological Imagination'. Within each division the essays are ordered chronologically. So although the period covered by the book is from the second to thefifteenthcentury it does not unfold consecutively. Thus any attempt to map changes in apocalytic sensibilities and understandings over time is difficult, although the editors provide a tentative guide to such changes (pp. 6-7). The collection demonstrates that a variety of medieval eschatological beliefs coexisted during the period, not all compatible with each other. However, the editors declare that 'the plethora of eschatological writings produced by the western European Middle Ages utilizes and deepens, rather than denies or impoverishes its multifold and contradictory traditions' (p. 9). Having considered the whole it is now time to look at the parts. A s might be expected from a book which combines papers from an American Historical Association panel, a graduate seminar on Eschatology, and some speciallycommissioned pieces, the contributions vary considerably in style and accomplishment, though the difference seems not to be related in any direct way to the age and experience of the individual scholars. It may be more a problem of the intractability of the subject matter; thus the essays which concentrate on a particular writer or object tend to come off better than more synthetic, 140 Reviews comparative, or theoretical ones. The exception here is Peter Brown's elegant and wide-ranging chapter, 'The Decline of the Empire of God: Amnesty, Penance, and the Afterlife from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages'. E. Randolph Daniel provides a useful introduction to Joachim of Fiore's apocalyptic thought and some fascinating glimpses of the less familiar A m a u de Vilanova are given by Clifford R. Backman. Arnau, famous in his own day as a doctor to kings and popes, also strove, with varying success, to have his apocalyptic writings recognised. Manuele Gragnolati examines an eschatological poem by Arnau's contemporary, Bonvesin de la Riva. The structure ofthe work ensures that Christ's passion is seen as the agent for transforming the human body from corruption to splendour. Suffering is also central to Caesarius ofHeisterbach's account ofthe death ofArchbishop Engelbert ofCologne, the subject ofJacqueline E. Jung's essay. Engelbert was not an obvious candidate for sainthood, being the very epitome of the worldly prelate. Nor could his assassination be construed as martyrdom in defence ofthe Church like that ofThomas Becket. Jung demonstrates how Caesarius sought to turn all this around by a novel emphasis on the redemptive suffering he underwent at the very end ofhis life which transformed him into a saint (for a while, at least). Anna Harrison raises the question of the kinds of relationships that Bernard of Clairvaux thought might exist between the saintly dead both before and after the Last Judgment andfindsthem somewhat lacking in communality. Many of these essays fall into the history basket, though Harvey Stahl, with...

Web Forum: Apocacide, Apocaholics and Apocalists

Web Forum: Apocacide, Apocaholics and Apocalists