This volume contains eleven essays that in one way or another address the theme of "last things" in Christian thought and history. Inspired by the work of E. Ann Matter, the topics reflect the chronological and thematic diversity of Matter's work. The editors have divided the essays into three thematic sections: "Gendering the Apocalypse," "Apocalyptic Theology and Exegesis," and "The Eschaton in Political, Liturgical, and Literary Contexts." Each section is arranged chronologically, reaching from late antiquity into early modernity. Like the theme of apocalypticism, the subject matter is diverse, its variety appropriately pushing against the boundaries of good order but nonetheless holding together, just barely, as a coherent body of work.
The opening section uses gender as an analytical frame for apocalyptic texts. Anchored in late antiquity, Mary R. D'Angelo first considers the figure of the Sibyl, who in classical tradition always spoke with the voice and demeanor of madness. Around the turn of the first century C.E., female visionaries (both Christian and pagan) adopted a new air of sobriety, perhaps a reflection of a greater role for women in civic patronage. The next chapter jumps forward a jarring 1400 years to consider the Marian apocalyptic visions of the Spanish abbess Juana de la Cruz (1481-1534). Jessica A. Boon demonstrates how Juana's visions likely grew out of a grounding in traditional apocalyptic sources but spoke to the specific circumstances of early modernity. Her apocalyptic sermons are in part political, in part predictive, and in part aimed at guiding souls toward redemption. Most strikingly, she creates an unusually Marian-centered apocalyptic narrative, in which Mary (whose company Christ has been keeping to himself, in the other worldly narrative, denying the angelic host her presence) plays the lead part in defeating demonic armies in the Last Days, a role Boon suggests grows naturally out of Mary's popular image as la conquistadora in the Spanish Empire. In this section's third and final essay, Gabriella Zarri discusses the imagined status of Bologna as an image of both the heavenly and earthly Jerusalems. With its detailed reconstruction of the Holy Sepulcher in the Basilica di Santo Stefano, Bologna more than most Italian cities had a claim to a special connection with Jerusalem. The sense of connection intensified in the thirteenth century, Zarri argues, with the construction of a new set of city walls with twelve gates, patterned after the heavenly city in Revelation. Bologna's devotional intensity reached something of an apogee, however, in the fifteenth century, when the fall of Constantinople made the earthly Jerusalem less accessible and the careful reconstruction of Bologna correspondingly more attractive for pilgrims. During the Counter-Reformation, this devotion to the heavenly Jerusalem further intersected with veneration of the Virgin Mary. It is a fine, sweeping essay, although the theme of gender does seem peripheral to Zarri's major concerns.
The volume's second section examines the biblical Apocalypse and the exegesis it inspired, beginning again in late antiquity. In "Risen to Judgment: What Augustine Saw," Francine Cardman focuses on Augustine's sermons, particularly on the interconnected themes of poverty, charity, and judgment. Writing, as he so often did, in dialogue with Donatist critics, Augustine argues that the Bible did not condemn wealth but rather advocated charity. Although he composed these sermons in the shadow of the sack of Rome and barbarian incursions into North Africa, the accent was less on current apocalyptic events and more on personal redemption. In the next chapter, Eric Knibbs moves the discussion into the Early Middle Ages with an examination of the commentary on the Apocalypse by Berengaudus. An obscure figure (his name appears in the commentary only via a cryptogram), Knibbs argues convincingly that Berengaudus must have produced his work between the collapse of the Carolingian Empire in 888 but before the emergence of the reform papacy in the mid-eleventh century. At the same time, he shows how an exegete working primarily with one source, the apocalyptic commentary of Haimo of Auxerre, could create something appropriate to his own slightly later time and circumstances. Bernard McGinn discusses the most famous medieval apocalyptic exegete, Joachim of Fiore. His essay provides a useful overview of Joachim's greatest achievement, the still difficult to access Expositio in Apocalaypsim, especially the allegoric work to which Joachim puts the Apostles Peter and John, representatives of the active and contemplative lives respectively. The final millennial age of human history--the third status in Joachim's vocabulary--would be dominated by the John the mystic and contemplative, a point which leads McGinn to mention the language of the Song of Songs, one of the primary topics of E. Ann Matter's research. This second section ends with a fascinating essay by James F. Melvin on apocalyptic traditions in the 1588 Tratado delaa verdaadera y falso prophecia by the converso Juan de Horozco y Covarrubia. Written in opposition to Protestants and to Spain's moriscos, Melvin shows how the Tratado drew on traditional medieval apocalyptic sources, including Joachim and Sibylline texts, and condemned more recent visionary phenomena, including a popular dance imported from the New World. Juan's treatise, he concludes, serves as a reminder that apocalypticism could be (and perhaps primarily was) an elite phenomenon intended to prop up existing social structures rather than undermine or challenge them.
The third and final section of the book serves as a sort of catch-all for various eschatological themes. Ross S. Kraemer presents several fifth-century case studies about apocalyptic concerns that ran through Jewish, Christian, and Samaritan devotion. Marcia Colish returns to Joachim of Fiore and how Innocent III utilized the abbot's ideas, in a letter to Baldwin of Flanders in November 1204, when trying to justify the Fourth Crusade. It was, Colish argues, more of a fleeting citation of Joachim rather than a wholehearted embrace of his ideas. Colish in fact examines some of the same imagery about Peter and John that gave shape to McGinn's essay, and it is indeed a shame that her chapter is not more directly juxtaposed with his. Colish, working from the same ideas as McGinn, finds Joachim's thought to be less an elegant presentation of the mystic's calling and more a garbled reading of Scripture that seeks innovation to no good end. In the next essay, the penultimate chapter in the volume, Lesley Smith offers, with characteristic clarity and sensitivity, a useful examination of the sacrament of extreme unction. Not just a discussion of unction, the essay functions as well as a wide-ranging tour of the history of scholastic theology. Admittedly, though, its connection to the main theme of apocalypticism is slight. Finally, the volume concludes with Angela Locatelli's treatment of "Religious and Amorous 'Apocalypses' in John Donne's Metaphysical Imagination." Locatelli demonstrates how some of the fundamental models of apocalyptic thought--for example, the individual experience of lovers serving as microcosm of the universe--informs Donne's notoriously dense poetry and sermons. As with Smith's essay, however, it is hard to escape the sense that eschatology is tangential to the work of the chapter, especially when, in the final reference to Donne's apocalyptic vision, "apocalyptic" appears in scare quotes.
Some students of apocalyptic thought will doubtless feel that Donne's detached or metaphysical approach to apocalypticism is too prevalent in this volume. There is little evidence of Norman Cohn's Pursuit of the Millennium style of apocalypticism here. As Melvin observes of Juan de Horozco y Covarrubia's work, the apocalypticism broadly construed here is an elite genre, a topic for carefully contrived intellectual discourse, not a motive force for mass popular action. The only mark of that other kind of apocalypticism in this volume is the potential influence of Joachim of Fiore on Innocent III and the Fourth Crusade, but Colish, as noted, downplays Joachim's importance for either papal policy or the course of historical events. This volume should serve as a reminder, if one is needed, that apocalyptic meditations do not invariably lead to terror and anarchy. But, of course, sometimes apocalypticism does lead precisely to those ends. Some presence of that kind of response to the End Times--plague, war, bloody harvests, dragons, and abominations--might have enriched this collection.
What is perhaps most lacking here is not what is in the text but what is not on the cover--the name E. Ann Matter. It goes without saying that its absence would have been a decision made not by the editors or contributors, but by the publisher, born of the misguided belief that festschrifts lack the commercial appeal of other scholarly essay collections (in the $100 price range) or that festschrifts somehow lack the scholarly rigor of volumes not intended to honor scholars to whom contributors feel a deep connection and admiration. This collection of careful and nuanced articles certainly undercuts that latter misconception. More than most festschrifts, Matter's inspiration and example inhabits these essays. Contributors regularly reference her work and engage with it in a direct and not at all pro forma way. More than the theme of the apocalypse, it is Matter's scholarly ideal that holds this volume together. Full confession, I am currently co-editing a festschrift in which the honoree is named on the cover, so I risk being self-serving in these comments. But it would also be a professional disservice not to use the opportunity of review to speak on behalf of festschrifts, which not only celebrate particular scholars (and potentially introduce wider circles of readers to their work) but also continue to provide us with excellent research and electrifying ideas.