LAST THINGS :
DEATH AND THE APOCALYPSE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

HEN THE MEDIEVALS SPOKE OF "LAST THINGS" THEY WERE
sometimes referring to events, such as the millennium or the appear
ance of the Antichrist, that would come to all of humanity or at the
end of time. But they also meant the last things that would come to
individual separately-not just the place, Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory, to which the
soul would go, but also the accounting, the calling to reckoning, that would come at
the end of life. At different periods in the Middle Ages one or the other of these sorts
of "last things" tended to be dominant, but the two coexisted throughout.

In Last Things, Caroline Walker Bynum and Paul Freedman bring together eleven
essays that focus on the competing eschatologies of the Middle Ages and on the ways
in which they expose different sensibilities, different theories of the human person,
and very different understandings of the body, of time, of the end. Exploring such
themes as the significance of dying and the afterlife, apocalyptic time, and the
eschatological imagination, each essay in the volume enriches our understanding of the
eschatological awarenesses of the European Middle Ages.

Contributors to the volume are Clifford R. Backman, Peter Brown, E. Randolph
Daniel, Manuele Gragnolati, Anna Harrison, Benjamin Hudson, Jacqueline E. Jung,
Claudia Rattazzi Papka, Laura A. Smoller, Harvey Stahl, and Carole Straw.

Caroline Walker Bynum is University Professor at Columbia University. She is the
author and editor of numerous books, including The Resurrection of the Body in
Western Christianity, 200-1336, and Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious
Significance of Food to Medieval Women.

Paul Freedman is Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of Images of
the Medieval Peasant and The Origins of Peasant Servitude in Medieval Catalonia.