What is an “Apocalyptic Culture”? I wish I knew. But I have company, because the contributors to this volume do not seem to know either. Researchers who study human beliefs concerning last things customarily distinguish between “eschatology,” “millennialism,” and “apocalypticism.” “Eschatology”--the broadest term--is simply the study of events connected with the presumed end of the world. “Millennialism” (or its synonyms “millenarianism” and “chiliasm”) is the belief in a coming wondrous time of miraculous peace and plenty on earth, whereas “apocalypticism” is the opposite--belief in horrendous events coming before the end. Almost all the characters in this book deal in eschatology; some are millennialists; others find that they are living during a time of apocalypticism. But what are apocalyptic cultures? I find that I do not understand this.
If we step back and agree that there were a good number of apocalyptic thinkers in the Middle Ages, this collective volume serves a useful purpose in introducing some of them or supplementing our knowledge of others. But it does not do so consistently, for the quality of the essays it contains runs the gamut from the plodding to the stunning.
I will dwell on the stunning. Judging from his contribution to the present book, Thomas Maurer, currently an assistant professor at Ave Maria University in Florida, could just as well be a full professor at any leading university in this country. He treats a congeries of Pseudo-Joachite works written in southern Italy in the 1260s that took Joachim of Fiore’s concordances to an ultimate degree of specificity. In the previous century Joachim had devised a prophetic system whereby events recounted in the Old Testament could be interpreted to foretell events in the New, and from there into the future. Now the works examined by Maurer proposed geographic concordances between Old Testament nations and thirteenth-century equivalents. In one case Arabia was Spain, Tyre was Sicily, and so forth. In another, the specificity extended to regions and cities: the fortunes of Philistia foretold those of Liguria, Lombardy, and Tuscany; Liguria meant Genoa, and Lombardy meant Milan, Brescia, and Cremona. Linkages could be precise. Bologna: “full of hoary old legalisms and nourishing secular studies, is a reflection of the valley of the sons of Hinnon named by Jeremiah” (123).
To what degree did linkages yield real predictions? In fact, there were predictions aplenty, but they were vituperative prophecies of doom--Jeremiads, literally and figuratively. Thus a southern Italian Joachite pilloried the Genoese for their profit-seeking and pride--for their “glorying in their ships” (120). The sea would be turned into blood, just as the Old Testament king Jehosaphat’s fleet had been destroyed as a penalty for his sins. But when that retribution would transpire the Joachite Jeremiah did not venture to say.
Richard Emmerson addresses iconography in his contribution, “The Apocalypse of the Duc de Berry and the Apocalyptic Great Schism.” Emmerson is a seasoned veteran of art-historical scholarship; he informs us that forty-seven years have passed since he completed his doctoral dissertation. The long experience shows. The Berry Apocalypse is the last in a series of sumptuous manuscripts commissioned by duke Jean de Berry (1340-1415), brother of King Charles V and uncle of King Charles VI of France. His thesis is that this manuscript offers a veiled statement about the Great Schism of the West. For one, its depiction of the “Whore of Babylon,” who according to the scriptural text “sits upon many waters,” here displays a woman who does not sit on waters but sits instead on a man-faced moon evidently representing the schismatic pope Petrus de Luna(Benedict XIII). Similarly, his manuscript’s depiction of the “woman clothed by the sun” shows no sun but depicts a woman as standing on the same man-faced moon that is Petrus de Luna and behind a seven-headed dragon who must be Satan. The Church at the time of the Berry Apocalypse was in a parlous state.
The longest article in this volume is Robert Bast’s “Prophecy and Policy: Maximilian I as Last World Emperor in Theory and Practice,” but its length is no imposition because Bast’s writing is delightful and his observations are insightful. He announces at the start that Maximilian I was “pious, not very bright, [and] always broke” (219). Nevertheless, he portrays him as a model “media Emperor” (220)--a “magician” who “curated his own image as the most capable royal warlord of his generation” (242). The image was founded on the creed of “imperial messianism”--the expectation of a heroic crusader, “always already there, forever virtually victorious” (248), who conquers Jerusalem according to “Last World Emperor” prophecies. According to Bast, Maximilian did not actually believe in this himself but “with an ethos of pragmatic opportunism he elected to manage it” (259). In this regard he drew on publicists who were happy to “spread the wings of the eagle” (226) in the face of the reality that Maximilian’s body was “racked by symptoms of liver disease, gallstones, jaundice, pneumonia [and] syphilis” (256). Bast presents much visual evidence to support his interpretation. This comes in the form of woodcuts taken from contemporary pamphlets: the emperor with recognizable physiognomy (we have a portrait of him by Dürer) in front of Jerusalem. Medievalists will always be somewhat envious of those working at the dawn of the early-modern era when printed evidence of this sort begins to increase exponentially.