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

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.

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.