Between Prophecy and Apocalypse
A Side Project Comes to (near) Fruition
Modern Medieval
by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele
Some news!
One of the things that all writers/ scholars/ academics do is juggle projects. And while and me keep working on Oathbreakers, I was simultaneously finishing up a long-languishing academic book project. Now the final manuscript has been submitted to Oxford University Press and it’ll be out in early 2024!
I’ve included some details below. And stay tuned for an Oathbreakers update soon…
Between Prophecy and Apocalypse: The Burden of Sacred Time and the Making of History in Early Medieval Europe
Matthew Gabriele
Oxford University Press, 2024
This book maps the movement between two intellectual stances, best described as a shift from prophetic to apocalyptic thinking in medieval Europe. Although the roots of this change lay in Late Antiquity, the fulcrum of this transition lies in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Biblical commentators in the fourth and fifth centuries enforced a particular understanding of sacred time that held until the ninth century, when exegetes of the ninth century found in their commentaries a different plan for God’s new chosen people. This came into stark relief as the new kingdom of Israel (the Frankish empire under the Carolingians) had splintered in the 840s. God was manifesting his displeasure with the chosen people by fire and sword. This all seemed fit within a plan.
Nostalgia entwined with an attentiveness to possible futures and spun together so tightly as to become a double helix.
What was perhaps unforeseen was that these commentaries that were written in the specific context of the Carolingian Civil War would be heavily copied and read for the next 200 years. Ideas that formed in a world that actively lamented the loss of empire had to be translated to a world that could only dream of that empire. As they spread across Europe, these ideas became the basis for monastic educational practices, and bled into other types of textual production, such as supposedly “secular” histories.
Ghosts of Prophecy charts an intellectual transformation triggered when the prescriptions laid out towards the end of the Carolingian empire began to be “realized” in subsequent centuries. Nostalgia entwined with an attentiveness to possible futures and spun together so tightly as to become a double helix. Ultimately, this book will offer a way to understand the central Middle Ages, a period of dynamic intellectual ferment when ideas could inspire action and (seemingly banal) conceptions of time and history could inspire moments of dramatic transformation and horrific violence.
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