Space and Time in Early-Modern Western Eschatology (2025)
De Boer, Wietse, and Christine Göttler. The Eschatological Imagination: Time, Space, and Experience (1300–1800). Intersections 96. Leiden: Brill, 2025.
“How did the early-modern Christian West conceive of the spaces and times of the afterlife? The answer to this question is not obvious for a period that saw profound changes in theology, when the telescope revealed the heavens to be as changeable and imperfect as the earth, and when archaeological and geological investigations made the earth and what lies beneath it another privileged site for the acquisition of new knowledge.
With its focus on the eschatological imagination at a time of transformation in cosmology, this volume opens up new ways of studying early-modern religious ideas, representations, and practices. The individual chapters explore a wealth of – at times little-known – visual and textual sources. Together they highlight how closely concepts and imaginaries of the hereafter were intertwined with the realities of the here and now.
Contributors: Matteo Al Kalak, Monica Azzolini, Wietse de Boer, Christine Göttler, Luke Holloway, Martha McGill, Walter S. Melion, Mia M. Mochizuki, Laurent Paya, Raphaèle Preisinger, Aviva Rothman, Minou Schraven, Anna-Claire Stinebring, Jane Tylus, and Antoinina Bevan Zlatar.
Biographical Note
Wietse de Boer is the Phillip R. Shriver Professor of History at Miami University (Ohio). His research interests are focused on Italian religious and cultural history (15th–17th centuries). His books include The Conquest of the Soul: Confession, Discipline, and Public Order in Counter-Reformation Milan (2001; Italian trans. 2004) and Art in Dispute: Catholic Debates at the Time of Trent (2021).
Christine Göttler is Professor Emerita of Art History at the University of Bern. Her research interests focus on the intersections between art, natural philosophy, and religion, the relationship between landscape and nature, and early modern notions of materiality and immateriality. Her publications include the monograph Last Things: Art and the Religious Imagination in the Age of Reform (2010).”
Text from the publisher’s website.
