Research Project

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Coping with the Future in High Medieval Spain. Beatus of Liébana, Eschatology and Ecclesiology, or a Non-historicist View of the Present. Texts and Pictures

Prof. Dr. Patrick Henriet

École Pratique des Hautes Études, Section des sciences historiques et philologiques, Paris
Research stay: Research stay: April - June 2011

Lectures at the IKGF:

  • Beatus of Liébana, text and images (VIIIth–XIIIth centuries). Conceptions of Time and Future in Medieval Spain, May 31, 2011.

Coping with the Future in High Medieval Spain. Beatus of Liébana, Eschatology and Ecclesiology, or a Non-historicist View of the Present. Texts and Pictures

Beatus of Liébana (second half of the VIIIth century) is an exceptional subject. This Asturian monk is the author (as far as we know) of a complete commentary on the Apocalypsis, written in a time of trouble. This commentary has been regularly illustrated and offers one of the most important corpuses of illuminations from the high Middle Ages (circa 20 manuscripts, from the IXth–XIIIth centuries). At the same time, Beatus is the only medieval exeget of the Apocalypse to have a reputation as a prophet (a false one, according to our source). I will study this corpus (i.e. Beatus' text and the post Beatus images) as follows.

I will begin with the complete bibliographic state regarding this topic: most of the time, the Commentary of the Apocalypsis by Beatus and his numerous illustrations have been seen as an interpretation of the present, particularly the Muslim invasion and domination of Spain (from 711). I doubt that this is the correct framework in which to view them.

The study of Beatus (text and images, as well as the relationships between them) will allow us to treat some problems that persist in the present; for example, the instrumentalization of time (apocalyptic future, but also present and past) in a multicultural society, but at the same time we should be careful: the answers to the question of what is time and how we can use it are essentially different because the ideological and religious frameworks of modernity are essentially different from those of Beatus' time. It is necessary, thus, to work on Beatus' discourse in a non anachronistic way: that means working on Beatus' ecclesiology. We are dealing here less with "political prophetism", as it existed in the last centuries of the Middle Ages, than with "ecclesiological prophetism", a way to understand the world that uses the future in the global history of salvation. Prophetism is the understanding of this history rather than the capacity to predict future developments. My final conclusions (I would say propositions) will deal with some XXth century thinkers who were particularly interested in "messianic time": Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin or, more recently, Stéphane Mosès and Giorgio Agamben.

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