Apocalyptic Cultures in Medieval and Renaissance Europe

The essays in this collection were presented at the 2020 Symposium on Apocalypticism, sponsored by the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Tennessee. The authors offer new readings of medieval and Renaissance Apocalypticism in quotidian terms, not as 'counterculture' but as the pragmatic expression of spiritualities that informed both debate and practice, on subjects as mundane and diverse as warfare, pilgrimage, gender, cartography, environmentalism, and governance. Topics include the origins of imperial eschatology; reflections on cosmology and the fate of the earth; the fusion of history, prophecy, and genealogy; Joachite readings of the political landscape of Italy; the influence of the Great Schism on Burgundian art; eschatology and gender in pilgrimage literature; the late medieval interpretation of the Revelationes of Pseudo-Methodius; and the appropriation of apocalyptic tropes in the propaganda and policies of the German emperor Maximilian I. The essays that open and close this collection offer meditations on the enduring legacy of Apocalypticism by focusing on the events - pandemic, political unrest, and the proliferation of conspiracy theories manifest in both - that mark the historical era in which this symposium took place.