Cultures of Eschatology

Cultures of Eschatology 1 Cultural History of Apocalyptic Thought/ Kulturgeschichte der Apokalypse  Edited by/Herausgegeben von Catherine Feik Veronika Wieser Christian Zolles Martin Zolles Volume/Band 3/1 Cultures of Eschatology  Volume 1: Empires and Scriptural Authorities in Medieval Christian, Islamic and Buddhist Communities Edited by Veronika Wieser, Vincent Eltschinger and Johann Heiss The two volumes are a result of the SFB (Spezialforschungsbereich) research cluster “ Visions of Community: Comparative Approaches to Ethnicity, Region and Empire in Christianity, Islam and Buddhism (400 – 1600 CE) (VISCOM, F 42 – G 18) ” , funded by the Austrian Research Fund (FWF, Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung in Österreich). ISBN 978-3-11-069031-6 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-059774-5 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-059358-7 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Library of Congress Control Number: 2019955311 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de © 2020 Veronika Wieser, Vincent Eltschinger, Johann Heiss, published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston The book is published open access at www.degruyter.com. Cover collage: Dagmar Giesriegl Cover images from: Beatus of Liébana, Commentarius in Apocalypsin – Apocalypse of Saint-Sever, fol. 137v [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Apocalypse_of_St._Sever#/media/File: ApocalypseStSeverRainFireBloodFol137v.jpg, last accessed 1 March, 2020] / Beatus of Liébana, Commentarius in Apocalypsin – Facundus, fol. 187 [https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatus#/media/ Fichier:B_Facundus_187.jpg, last accessed 1 March, 2020] / Gaki Zoshi (Scroll of Hungry Ghosts), Tokyo National Museum / [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungry_ghost#/media/File:Gaki_zoshi_- _Tokyo.jpeg, last accessed 1 March, 2020] / Detail of Yama, the Lord of Death, holding the Wheel of Life that represents Samsara, or the world, © Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Collection, images@wellcome.ac.uk http://wellcomeimages.org, last accessed 1 March, 2020] Typesetting: bsix information exchange GmbH, Braunschweig Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com Contents Cultures of Eschatology, volume 1 Empires and Scriptural Authorities in Medieval Christian, Islamic and Buddhist Communities Veronika Wieser, Vincent Eltschinger and Johann Heiss Preface and Acknowledgments  XI Notes on Contributors, volume 1  XIII Veronika Wieser and Vincent Eltschinger Introduction: Approaches to Medieval Cultures of Eschatology  1 Literary and Visual Traditions Guy Lobrichon Making Ends Meet: Western Eschatologies, or the Future of a Society (9th – 12th Centuries). Addition of Individual Projects, or Collective Construction of a Radiant Dawn?  25 Uta Heil Apocalyptic Literature – A Never-Ending Story  45 Sebastian Günther “ When the Sun is Shrouded in Darkness and the Stars are Dimmed ” (Qur ʾ an 81:1 – 2). Imagery, Rhetoric and Doctrinal Instruction in Muslim Apocalyptic Literature  66 Armin Bergmeier Volatile Images: The Empty Throne and its Place in the Byzantine Last Judgment Iconography  84 Appendix  106 Vincent Eltschinger On some Buddhist Uses of the kaliyuga  123 Scriptural Traditions and their Reinterpretations Michael Sommer Choices – The Use of Textual Authorities in the Revelation of John  165 Johannes van Oort Manichaean Eschatology: Gnostic-Christian Thinking about Last Things  181 Cinzia Grifoni and Clemens Gantner The Third Latin Recension of the Revelationes of Pseudo-Methodius – Introduction and Edition  194 Appendix: Cinzia Grifoni, cur., Pseudo-Methodius ’ Revelationes in the so-called Third Latin Recension  233 Matthias Däumer Eschatological Relativity. On the Scriptural Undermining of Apocalypses in Jewish Second Temple, Late Antique and Medieval Receptions of the Book of Watchers  254 Empires and Last Days 1 Philippe Buc Eschatologies of the Sword, Compared: Latin Christianity, Islam(s), and Japanese Buddhism  277 Stephen Shoemaker The Portents of the Hour: Eschatology and Empire in the Early Islamic Tradition  294 Ann Christys The History of Ibn Ḥ ab ī b: al-Andalus in the Last Days  319 James T. Palmer Apocalyptic Insiders? Identity and Heresy in Early Medieval Iberia and Francia  337 VI  Contents Apocalyptic Cosmologies and End Time Actors Zsóka Gelle Treasure Texts on the Age of Decline: Prophecies Concerning the Hidden Land of Yolmo, their Reception and Impact  359 Faustina Doufikar-Aerts Gog and Magog Crossing Borders: Biblical, Christian and Islamic Imaginings  390 Johann Heiss and Eirik Hovden Zayd ī Theology Popularised: A Hailstorm Hitting the Heterodox  415 Elena Tealdi Political Propheticism. John of Rupescissa ’ s Figure of the End Times Emperor and its Evolution  441 Contents  VII Cultures of Eschatology, volume 2 Time, Death and Afterlife in Medieval Christian, Islamic and Buddhist Communities Veronika Wieser, Vincent Eltschinger and Johann Heiss Notes on Contributors, volume 2  IX Death and Last Judgment Roberto Tottoli Death and Eschatological Beliefs in the Lives of the Prophets according to Islam  467 Pia Lucas Scattered Bones and Miracles – The Cult of Saints, the Resurrection of the Body and Eschatological Thought in the Works of Gregory of Tours  479 Miriam Czock Arguing for Improvement: The Last Judgment, Time and the Future in Dhuoda ’ s Liber manualis  509 Bernhard Scheid Death and Pollution as a Common Matrix of Japanese Buddhism and Shint ō  528 Afterlife and Otherworld Empires Marilyn Dunn Apocalypse Now? Body, Soul and Judgment in the Christianisation of the Anglo-Saxons  549 Frederick Shih-Chung Chen The Evolution of the Buddhist Otherworld Empire in Early Medieval China  578 Eirini Afentoulidou Space and Power in Byzantine Accounts of the Aerial Tollhouses  603 VIII  Contents Marc Tiefenauer The End of the End: Devotion as an Antidote to Hell  616 Empires and Last Days 2 Johann Heiss The Multiple Uses of an Enemy: Gog, Magog and the “ Two-Horned One ”  631 Immo Warntjes A.D. 672 – The Apex of Apocalyptic Thought in the Early Medieval Latin West?  642 Graeme Ward Exegesis, Empire and Eschatology: Reading Orosius ’ Histories Against the Pagans in the Carolingian World  674 Rutger Kramer The Bede Goes On: Pastoral Eschatology in the Prologue to the Chronicle of Moissac (Paris BN lat. 4886)  698 The Afterlife of Eschatology Kurt Appel The Testament of Time – The Apocalypse of John and the recapitulatio of Time according to Giorgio Agamben  733 Martin Treml Eschatology as Occidental Lebensform : The Case of Jacob Taubes  759 Christian Zolles History beyond the Ken: Towards a Critical Historiography of Apocalyptic Politics with Jacob Taubes and Michel Foucault  783 Index Proper Names  817 Geographical Names and Toponyms  829 Contents  IX Preface and Acknowledgements Cultures of Eschatology is a result of the SFB (Spezialforschungsbereich) “ Visions of Community: Comparative Approaches to Ethnicity, Region and Empire in Christian- ity, Islam and Buddhism (400 – 1600 CE) (VISCOM) ” , funded by the Austrian Re- search Fund (FWF) during the period 2011 – 2019. 1 In this interdisciplinary research cluster, historians, social anthropologists, philologists and art historians worked to- gether in order to examine, in a comparative and cross-cultural perspective, the role of universal religions in the formation of particular communities in medieval Eura- sia. 2 This thematic and methodological approach has inspired much of our research on eschatology and apocalypticism. Our intensive interdisciplinary exchange within the VISCOM project was carried out in the framework of the “ transversal working group ” “ End Times ” ; its results were subsequently presented and discussed at the international conference “ Making Ends Meet: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the End of Times in Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism ” that took place in the “ Theater- saal ” of the Austrian Academy of Sciences on 24 – 26 September, 2015. 3 These two volumes, which are the somewhat expanded proceedings of this event, include con- tributions by members and associated researchers of the VISCOM project team as well as by invited scholars whose expertise allowed us to address a wide range of topics in different religious and political contexts. We are very grateful to all of them for their enthusiastic participation, their contributions and their willingness to share their research results with us. We are also very grateful to the FWF and the SFB ’ s two host institutions, the Austrian Academy of Sciences (AAS) and the Univer- sity of Vienna, for their generous support. The Institute for Medieval Research (AAS) 1 See Introduction, n. 1. 2 First results have been published in the volume Meanings of Community across Medieval Eurasia , edited by Hovden, Lutter, Pohl (Brill, 2016), which addresses problems of comparative methodol- ogy, see Pohl, “ Introduction: Meanings of Community in Medieval Eurasia ” , and the thematic issue of History and Anthropology : Visions of Community: Comparative Approaches to Medieval Forms of Identity in Europe and Asia edited by Gingrich and Lutter (Taylor & Francis, 2014). Other joint pub- lications are the volumes Medieval Biographical Collections , edited by Ó Riain, Vocino, Mahoney (Brill, forthcoming 2020), the six-volume series Historiography and Identity (Brepols, 2019 and forth- coming), the volumes Practising Community in Urban and Rural Eurasia , edited by Hovden, Kümm- eler and Majorossy (Brill, 2021) and Rethinking Scholastic Communities across Medieval Eurasia , edited by Kellner and Hugon (forthcoming 2020/2021). Important for the project was also the pub- lication Visions of Community in the Post-Roman World , edited by Pohl, Gantner, Payne (Routledge, 2012). For further information see https://viscom.ac.at/home/ and https://viscom.ac.at/fileadmin/ user_upload/ONLINE_EDITION_viscom_PUBLIKATIONEN_17072019.pdf. [Last accessed, 1 July, 2019] 3 A section of the project ’ s midterm conference in November 2013 was also dedicated to eschatology and apocalypticism. Some of the contributions in the present volumes were originally presented there. See https://viscom.ac.at/fileadmin/mediapool-viscom/pdfs/programm_midterm_web.pdf [Last accessed, 1 July, 2019] Open Access. © 2020 Veronika Wieser, Vincent Eltschinger, Johann Heiss, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110597745-202 has provided an excellent institutional hub for our work. We would like to express our thanks to the institute ’ s staff and its VISCOM partner institutions, the Institute for Social Anthropology (AAS) and the Institute for the Cultural and Intellectual His- tory of Asia (AAS) for providing a fertile environment for exchange and discussion. For their help with organising the conference we would like to thank Anna Denkmayr, Sophie Gruber and Jelle Wassenaar. For their diligent work with copy- editing we would like to thank Peter Fraundorfer, Thomas Gobbitt, Cinzia Grifoni, Diarmuid Ó Riain, Brita Pohl, Christina Pössel, and Bojana Radovanovi ć . Erik Goos- mann created the maps, and Dagmar Giesriegl was responsible for the wonderful cover illustrations and for the visual preparation of all pictures included. The editors Note on the transcriptions of Arabic words: Readers will notice that the transcrip- tion or romanisation of Arabic words generally follows the rules of IJMES (Interna- tional Journal of Middle East Studies) but are not consistently handled across all articles. If geographical or other names have a commonly used form in English, this is used, e.g. Mecca (not Makka), Medina (not al-Mad ī na). Instead of Coran, Qur ’ an or Qur ’ ā n is used. The transcription of Sanskrit, Tibetan and Chinese expressions fully conforms to the generally recognised international standards: for Sanskrit, the latinisation system adopted at the 10th International Congress of Orientalists held in Geneva in 1894; for Tibetan, the Wylie system; for Chinese, the pinyin romanisation method. XII  Preface and Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors, volume 1 Faustina Aerts-Doufikar is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Vrije Univer- siteit Amsterdam. Her research focuses on cultural transfer and dissemination of lit- erary, religious and artistic motifs from Antiquity into the Islamic world. Her areas of expertise are the oriental Alexander tradition, the Islamic Gog and Magog tradi- tions, Islamic manuscripts, the Susanna motif and popular epics. Between 2012 – 2018 she held a VIDI grant research project on the interdisciplinary study of the lit- erary and artistic traditions concerning Alexander the Great in the Islamic world. She has published as author and editor widely on all these topics, including Gog and Magog. The Clans of Chaos in World Literature (ed., Purdue University Press, 2007) and “ Alexander the Great in the Syriac and Arabic Tradition: A Hero Without Borders ” (In Fictional Storytelling in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean and Be- yond , Brill, 2016). Armin Bergmeier (MA in art history, Humboldt University, Berlin; PhD in late an- tique and Byzantine art history, Ludwig-Maximilian University, Munich) is an art historian of late antique, Byzantine, and Western medieval art with focus on the Eastern Mediterranean and Italy. His work explores changes and transformations across cultures, questions of the presence of art works and architecture, and the By- zantine artistic heritage in Venice. Since 2016, he has been Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Leipzig. He has held research residencies at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, and the Centro Tedesco in Venice. In 2019, he was the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Byzantine Studies at Bo ğ aziçi University, Istan- bul. His first book is entitled Visionserwartungen: Visualisierung und Präsenzerfah- rung des Göttlichen in der Spätantike (Reichert Press 2017), and has received the Hans-Janssen award from the Academy of Arts and Sciences in Göttingen. Philippe Buc was trained in both France (Paris I Sorbonne and EHESS) and the United States (Swarthmore College and University of California at Berkeley). Having first taught at Stanford University (1990 – 2011), he has been Professor of Medieval History at the University of Vienna since 2011. He is a specialist in the medieval Catholic theology of politics, illustrated by his work L ’ ambiguïté du Livre (Editions Beauchesne, 1994) and his critical discussion of the relationship of Anthropology and History, The Dangers of Ritual (Princeton University Press, 2001). Building on his last book, Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror: Christianity, Violence, and the West (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), he is currently working on a comparative history of the impact of religions on warfare. Ann Christys is an independent scholar trained in Leeds. She studies the historio- graphy of early medieval Spain in Latin and Arabic. In 2015 she published Vikings in the South: Voyages to Iberia and the Mediterranean (Bloomsbury Academic). Matthias Däumer is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant and (after academic employ- ments at the Universities of Mainz, Gießen, Berlin, and Tübingen) currently teach- ing medieval literature at the University of Vienna. His research and publications focus mainly on medieval mediality, serial narration, the Arthurian romances, re- ception of medieval matters in film and comic, and literary journeys to hell. His up- coming second monograph is about the interferences of these journeys with the courtly romances of the 12th and 13th centuries. Vincent Eltschinger is Professor for Indian Buddhism at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, PSL Research University, Paris. His research work focuses on the re- ligious background, the apologetic dimensions and the intellectual genealogy of late Indian Buddhist philosophy. His publications include numerous books and arti- cles dedicated to various aspects of the Indian Buddhists ’ polemical interaction with orthodox Brahmanism from A ś vagho ṣ a to late Indian Buddhist epistemologists such as Ś a ṅ karanandana. Mention can be made of Penser l ’ autorité des Écritures (VÖAW, 2007), Caste and Buddhist Philosophy (Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 2012), Buddhist Epistemology as Apologetics (VÖAW, 2014), Self, No-Self and Salva- tion (VÖAW, 2013, together with Isabelle Ratié). Vincent Eltschinger, one of the edi- tors of Brill ’ s Encyclopedia of Buddhism , has been teaching at various universities including Budapest, Lausanne, Leiden, Leipzig, Tokyo, Venice, Vienna, and Zurich. Clemens Gantner is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Medieval Re- search at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. He was a collaborator in sev- eral significant research projects in Vienna, most notably the HERA project Cultural Memory and the Resources of the Past (2010 – 2013) and the ERC AdG Project Social Cohesion, Identity and Religion in the Early Middle Ages (2013 – 2016). His research is centred on early medieval Italy and intra- and intercultural communication around the Mediterranean. One of his research interests is the movement and appropriation of eastern texts and ideas in the early Latin West. Currently, he is preparing a mono- graph on Louis II, great-grandson of Charlemagne and emperor in Italy in the ninth century. His most important publication is Freunde Roms und Völker der Finsternis (Böhlau, 2014), which deals with the perceptions of Others by the early medieval papacy. Zsóka Gelle completed her BA in History, BA and MA in Tibetan Studies in Hun- gary, and obtained her PhD at the University of Vienna. Between 2011 – 2014 she was a member of the Doctoral College “ Cultural Transfers and Cross-Contacts in the Hi- malayan Borderlands ” at the University of Vienna, and her contribution in the XIV  Notes on Contributors, volume 1 present volumes is mostly based on the research and fieldtrips she conducted dur- ing that time. She worked as a lecturer at Eötvös Loránd University and as a Khyen- tse Fellow at the Budapest Center for Buddhist Research between 2014 – 2016. She taught courses on Tibetan religious practice, Tibetan canonical literature and sacred space in Buddhism. Her main research interests lie in the areas of Nyingma tradi- tion, gter ma literature, history of political and religious contacts between Tibet and Nepal in the 17th – 18th centuries, mountain cult, and oral history. Presently she is an independent scholar, living in Bad Ischl, Austria, directing the Yolmo Heritage Project supported by Khyentse Foundation. Cinzia Grifoni was a Postdoc Researcher in the SFB “ Visions of Community ” project. Therein, she investigated the development of understanding and use of Latin ethnic designations in the medieval West and was responsible for the contents of the online resource “ GENS – Group Terminology and Ethnic Nomenclature: A Se- mantic Database (Latin Europe c. 400 – 1200) ” . The output of the early medieval scriptorium of the Wissembourg monastery is another important focus of her re- search. She has published with Brepols the Glossae in Matthaeum ascribed to Otfrid of Wissembourg (CC CM 200) and written several contributions on early medieval exegetic production at Wissembourg and St. Gall. Currently, she holds a Marie Jaho- da Grant from the University of Vienna. Sebastian Günther is Professor and Chair of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the Uni- versity of Göttingen. His research focuses on the intellectual heritage of the Arabic- Islamic world, in particular the Qur ’ an, religious and philosophical thought, and Arabic belles-lettres. Furthermore, several of his studies are devoted to Islamic ethics and education. Sebastian Günther is co-editor of the Islamic History and Civi- lization series (Brill) and a former president of the Union Européenne des Arabisants et Islamisants. Günther ’ s recent publications include the co-edited volumes Roads to Paradise: Eschatology and Concepts of the Hereafter in Islam with Todd Lawson (Brill, 2017) and Die Geheimnisse der oberen und der unteren Welt: Magie im Islam zwischen Glaube und Wissenschaft with Dorothee Pielow (Brill, 2018). Uta Heil is Professor of Church History at the Protestant Theological Faculty of the University of Vienna since 2015. Her research interests include the apologetic litera- ture of the second century CE; the Trinitarian debate during the fourth and sixth centuries, Christianity in the time of migration and the development of a Sunday culture in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. She is one of the main editors of the Journal of Ancient Christianity (De Gruyter). Currently, she is directing a re- search project on the “ Documents on the History of the Debates on Arianism ” and a project on “ The Apocryphal Sunday on Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. ” Notes on Contributors, volume 1  XV Johann Heiss is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology (ISA) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. After studying Classical Philology and Arabic language he finished his study of Social and Cultural Anthropology 1998 with a dissertation on the first imam of the Yemen and the tribal situation in the tenth century. He carried out field research in Saudi-Arabia (together with Walter Dostal and Andre Gingrich), Yemen (together with Andre Gingrich), Indonesia (with Martin Slama) and Lower Austria. He was project leader of “ Shifting Memories, Manifest Monuments ” , addressing the memory of the Turks in Central Europe (ended in 2013); coordinator on the South Arabian part of the SFB “ Visions of Com- munity ” project. His most recent publications include “ Migrations and Federations: The Origins of the Tribal Federation of Khawl ā n According to al-Hamd ā n ī ” (In The Medieval History Journal , 2018), and, together with Eirik Hovden, “ Competing Vi- sions of Community in Medieval Zayd ī Yemen ” (In Journal of the Economic and So- cial History of the Orient , 2016). Eirik Hovden is a Postdoc Researcher at the Department of Foreign Languages, University of Bergen, Norway. After studying Geography, Social Anthropology and Arabic, Hovden wrote his MA thesis on rural water management in north-western Yemen and his doctoral thesis on Zayd ī Islamic law and historical practices of reli- gious endowments ( waqf ) in Yemen, both based on fieldwork in Yemen. From 2012 – 2016, he was part of the SFB “ Visions of Community ” research project, working on medieval South Arabian history, and from 2016 – 2018 he was part of the HERA project “ Uses of the Past in Islamic law ” (Exeter, UK), focusing on Zayd ī Islamic le- gal theories of governance. He is co-editor of the VISCOM volume Meanings of Com- munity across Medieval Eurasia, together with Christina Lutter and Walter Pohl (Brill, 2016), and published his monograph on Waqf in Zayd ī Yemen. Legal Theory, Codification and Local Practice 2019 with Brill. Guy Lobrichon was a lecturer at the Collège de France, then Professor of History at the University of Avignon (now emeritus). Amongst numerous publications, he wrote on La Bible au Moyen Âge (Éditions Picard, 2003), Romanesque Burgundy (Édi- tions Stéphane Bachès, 2013/2015) and collaborated on The New Cambridge History of Christianity. Early Medieval Christianity, c. 600 – c. 1100 (Cambridge University Press, 2008), and The New Cambridge History of the Bible. From 600 to 1450 (Cam- bridge University Press, 2012). Johannes van Oort is Professor emeritus of Utrecht University and Radboud Uni- versity and presently Professor of Patristics at the University of Pretoria. He pub- lished over 25 books and numerous scholarly articles, mainly on Augustine and Manichaeism, as editor and author. Among his newly published books are Augus- tine and Manichaeism in the Latin West (ed., Brill, 2001); Zugänge zur Gnosis (ed. together with Christoph Markschies, Leuven, 2012); Augustine and Manichaean XVI  Notes on Contributors, volume 1 Christianity (ed., Brill, 2013); Jerusalem and Babylon: A Study into Augustine ’ s City of God (Brill, 2015 [1991]); and Mani and Augustine: Collected Essays on Mani, Manichaeism and Augustine (Brill, 2020). In 2011, he was presented with the Fest- schrift ‘ In Search of Truth ’ : Augustine, Manichaeism and other Gnosticism. Studies for Johannes van Oort at Sixty (Brill, 2010/repr. 2017). Among others, he is co-editor of Vigiliae Christianae , the Supplements to VC , the Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies , and the Corpus Fontium Manichaeorum funded by the UNESCO, the British Academy, the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Union Académique Internationale. James Palmer has taught at the University of St Andrews since 2007 and is present- ly Professor of History. Before that he taught at the universities of Nottingham and Leicester. He is the author of Anglo-Saxons in a Frankish World 690 – 900 (Brepols, 2009), The Apocalypse in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and Early Medieval Hagiography (Arc Humanities, 2018). He has recently edited the volume Apocalypse and Reform from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages (Routledge, 2018) with Matthew Gabriele. Stephen J. Shoemaker is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Oregon. He is a specialist on the history of Christianity and the beginnings of Islam. His pri- mary interests lie in the ancient and early medieval Christian traditions, more specifically in early Byzantine and Near Eastern Christianity. His research focuses on early devotion to the Virgin Mary, Christian apocryphal literature, and Islamic origins. Among his publications are The Apocalypse of Empire: Imperial Eschatology in Late Antiquity and Early Islam (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018); The First Christian Hymnal: The Songs of the Ancient Jerusalem Church (Brigham Young Uni- versity, 2018); Mary in Early Christian Faith and Devotion (Yale University Press, 2016); Three Christian Martyrdoms from Early Islamic Palestine (Brigham Young Uni- versity, 2016) and The Death of a Prophet: The End of Muhammad ’ s Life and the Be- ginnings of Islam (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). Michael Sommer is Stand-in Professor of New Testament Exegesis and Biblical Hermeneutics at the Ludwig-Maximilian University Munich. Before that he taught at the University of Halle and received his PhD in 2013 from the University of Regens- burg. His research focuses on prophetic texts and intertextuality. He is author of several publications on the Revelation of John and editoral board member of TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism, WiBiLex and Zeitschrift für Neues Testament (ZNT). Elena Tealdi achieved a PhD in History of Christianism at the Catholic University of Sacro Cuore in Milan. She was a member of the ERC project “ Origins of the Vernac- ular Mode ” directed by Pavlína Rychterová at the Institute for Medieval Research at Notes on Contributors, volume 1  XVII the Austrian Academy of Sciences and published the critical edition of John of Ru- pescissa ’ s Vade mecum in tribulatione , together with Gian Luca Potestà and Robert E. Lerner (Vita e Pensiero, 2015). Her main subjects of research are connected to the history of theology and propheticism in the Middle Ages. Veronika Wieser is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Medieval Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and a reader in Medieval History at the Univer- sity of Vienna. From 2011 to 2015, she has worked as a coordinator and researcher within the SFB “ Visions of Community ” project. Her research revolves around all aspects of eschatology as well as around ascetic communities, historiography and literary traditions in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. She has recently edited the volume Historiography and Identity: Ancient and Christian Narratives to- gether with Walter Pohl (Brill, 2019) and is co-editor of the series Cultural History of Apocalyptic Thought (De Gruyter) together with Christian Zolles. Currently, she is working on her monograph on the role of the End Times in late antique Christian historiography. XVIII  Notes on Contributors, volume 1 Notes on Contributors, volume 2 Eirini Afentoulidou is a Postdoc Researcher at the Institute for Medieval Research, Division of Byzantine Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, specialising in Byzantine language, literature and mentality. After studying Greek Philology at the Aristoteles University of Thessaloniki (2000) she obtained her doctoral degree at the University of Vienna (2005). She is author of several publications on Byzantine lan- guage and style, hymnography, images of afterlife and prayerbooks, especially prayers for childbed. Kurt Appel is Professor for Fundamental Theology at the University of Vienna and the director of the interdisciplinary research centre “ Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society ” . He was visiting professor at the universities of Trento, Milan and Bologna. His research areas are new humanism, eschatology, philosophy of his- tory, German idealism (especially Hegel ’ s speculative writings), postmodern philos- ophy, theology and politics and the question of God. His recent publications include Tempo e Dio. Aperture contemporanee a partire da Hegel and Schelling (Queriniana, 2018) and “ Das Dieses ist ein Baum. Der absolute Geist als freies Dasein der Wirk- lichkeit ” (In: Objektiver und absoluter Geist nach Hegel (Brill, 2018). He is the editor of the open access journal J-RaT ( Journal of Religion and Transformation ) and author and editor of numerous monographs, articles and scientific anthologies (in German, Italian and English). Frederick Shih-Chung Chen is a research associate and was the Sheng Yen Post- doctoral Research Fellow in Chinese Buddhism (2015 – 2017) at the Department of Philosophy at the National Chengchi University, Taipei. He obtained his PhD in Ori- ental Studies at the University of Oxford in 2010. His main academic interests are the history and archaeology of early and medieval Chinese Buddhism. Miriam Czock studied History and Philosophy at the Ruhr-University Bochum. She obtained her doctoral degree with a study on Gottes Haus. Untersuchungen zur Kirche als heiligem Raum von der Spätantike bis ins Frühmittelalter . She is a senior lecturer at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Her main research interest lies in the periods of early and high medieval Europe, specifically on the emergence of a Chris- tian concept of society that is rooted in intellectual models of space and time. Other fields of interest are sacrality, legal-practices as well as the workings of early me- dieval local society. She has published widely on all these topics and together with Anja Rathman-Lutz she has edited the volume ZeitenWelten. Zur Verschränkung von Zeitwahrnehmung und Weltdeutung (750 – 1350) (Böhlau, 2016). Marilyn Dunn is Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Medieval History in the School of Humanities, College of Arts, at the University of Glasgow. She is the au- thor of The Emergence of Monasticism (Blackwell, 2003); The Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons (Continuum, 2009); Belief and Religion in Barbarian Europe (Blooms- bury, 2013); and Arianism (Arc Humanities Press, forthcoming). Her current research project is Ex-voto: A Cognitive History Johann Heiss is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology (ISA) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. After studying Classical Philology and Arabic language he finished his study of Social and Cultural Anthropology 1998 with a dissertation on the first imam of the Yemen and the tribal situation in the tenth century. He carried out field research in Saudi-Arabia (together with Walter Dostal and Andre Gingrich), Yemen (together with Andre Gingrich), Indonesia (with Martin Slama) and Lower Austria. He was project leader of “ Shifting Memories, Manifest Monuments ” , addressing the memory of the Turks in Central Europe (ended in 2013); coordinator on the South Arabian part of the SFB “ Visions of Com- munity ” project. His most recent publications include “ Migrations and Federations: The Origins of the Tribal Federation of Khawl ā n According to al-Hamd ā n ī ” (In The Medieval History Journal , 2018), and, together with Eirik Hovden, “ Competing Vi- sions of Community in Medieval Zayd ī Yemen ” (In Journal of the Economic and So- cial History of the Orient , 2016). Rutger Kramer finished his PhD at Freie Universität in Berlin, and has worked as a Postdoc Researcher within the SFB “ Visions of Community ” project at the Institute for Medieval Research since 2011, where he also finished his monograph, Rethinking Authority in the Carolingian Empire (Amsterdam University Press, 2019). Since 2019, he is employed as a lecturer in Medieval History at the Radboud University in Nijme- gen. His research revolves around all aspects of Carolingian intellectual culture, from monastic reforms to the development of imperial ideologies, and from hagio- graphical traditions to the way historiography was used to shape the present and the future of the Frankish Empire. Pia Lucas is researcher and lecturer in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages at Freie Universität Berlin. In her dissertation, she is currently examining the inclusion of saints from across the Mediterranean in the works of the sixth-century bishop Gregory of Tours. Over the course of two research projects, she worked on processes of exchange across the late antique and early medieval Mediterranean and co-edited the volume The Merovingian Kingdoms and the Mediterranean World: Revisiting the Sources (Bloomsbury, 2019) together with Stefan Esders, Yitzhak Hen and Tamar Rotman. X  Notes on Contributors, volume 2