We are seeking submissions that touch on this theme in the Medieval and Early Modern periods, as well as their reception in later periods. Given the contemporary interest in the apocalyptic — whether political, spiritual, or medical — we are looking for papers that speak to feeling, dread, or even longing for apocalypse and/or its power to reveal in the Medieval and Early Modern periods. From the Greek ἀποκάλυψις, an apocalypse is at root a “revelation,” and this year, we hope to explore how the relationship between the contemporary vision of apocalypse and revelation, divine or otherwise, intersect, coexist, and complicate one another. Speakers are invited to address this topic from a diversity of perspectives and methodologies.
Submissions may focus on topics including, but not limited to:
- Christian, religious eschatologies
- Upheaval, destruction & disaster
- Plague and its consequences
- Medieval and Early Modern iconography
- Prophetic or historicist visions
- Epistolary and/or prophetic modes of literature
- Allegories of spiritual paths
- Struggle between Christians and non-Christians
- Pseudonymity and symbolic imagery
- Christian and/or Jewish cosmologies
- Unveilings, revolutions
- The year 1000
- Apocalypticism as driving social and political change
