Imagining the Afterlife
Sponsoring Organization(s)
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale Univ.; Medieval Studies Program, Yale Univ.
Organizer Name
Gina Marie Hurley; Clara Wild; Kristen Herdman
Organizer Affiliation
Yale Univ.; Yale Univ.; Yale Univ.
Presider Name
Clara Wild
Paper Title 1
"What Quill of Scribe, What Voice, What Tongue!" : Forgetting Heaven in the Apocalypsis Goliae
Presenter 1 Name
Thomas C. Sawyer
Presenter 1 Affiliation
Washington Univ. in St. Louis
Paper Title 2
Dying Eternally: On the Rhetoric of Anchoritic Pleasure
Presenter 2 Name
Clare Davidson
Presenter 2 Affiliation
Univ. of Western Australia
Paper Title 3
Taking the Fifth Road: Fairyland in Middle English Romances
Presenter 3 Name
Chera A. Cole
Presenter 3 Affiliation
Texas Woman's Univ.
Paper Title 4
Nature, Religious Experience, and the Afterlife
Presenter 4 Name
Ryan Lawrence
Presenter 4 Affiliation
Cornell Univ.
Start Date
12-5-2018 1:30 PM
Session Location
Bernhard 106
Description
From the sermons preached in parish churches to the tympanums which adorned great cathedrals, the inevitability of the afterlife is enshrined in scenes of judgment and depictions of events yet to come. As Alastair Minnis has shown in From Eden to Eternity, scholastic discussions of the afterlife were not merely theoretical speculations. They had broad implications for the understanding of human nature, both as it should have been and as it could be. Even outside the universities, ideas about the afterlife were explored in diverse mediums: from the Visio Tundalis, to Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights to Dante’s Divine Comedy. Moreover, as Barbara Newman’s work has revealed, women had substantial influence on the creation of doctrines about purgatory and the forms of piety that developed in response to them. Papers might address these and other questions: Why and how were these literary, theological, and artistic representations constructed and what were their impact? What are the sounds, the feelings, the scents and the sights of heaven, purgatory, and hell? How did ideas about the afterlife manifest in practices and rituals around death and burial?
Gina M. Hurley
Imagining the Afterlife
Bernhard 106
From the sermons preached in parish churches to the tympanums which adorned great cathedrals, the inevitability of the afterlife is enshrined in scenes of judgment and depictions of events yet to come. As Alastair Minnis has shown in From Eden to Eternity, scholastic discussions of the afterlife were not merely theoretical speculations. They had broad implications for the understanding of human nature, both as it should have been and as it could be. Even outside the universities, ideas about the afterlife were explored in diverse mediums: from the Visio Tundalis, to Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights to Dante’s Divine Comedy. Moreover, as Barbara Newman’s work has revealed, women had substantial influence on the creation of doctrines about purgatory and the forms of piety that developed in response to them. Papers might address these and other questions: Why and how were these literary, theological, and artistic representations constructed and what were their impact? What are the sounds, the feelings, the scents and the sights of heaven, purgatory, and hell? How did ideas about the afterlife manifest in practices and rituals around death and burial?
Gina M. Hurley