Due to the COVID-19 outbreak and the most recent recommendations of the CDC and the WHO regarding social distancing and public gatherings, the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University has made the difficult decision to cancel the 55th International Congress on Medieval Studies (May 7-10, 2020).

Apocalyptic Trajectories in Early Byzantium

Byzantine apocalyptic literature greatly shaped the apocalyptic imagination of the Middle Ages. Various narrative sequences and even whole texts that originated in Byzantium came to fundamentally condition the medieval outlook of the eschatological future. This session is dedicated to an interdisciplinary discussion of medieval Greek apocalyptic traditions, with an emphasis on historiography, hermeneutical approaches, and textual analysis.

Medieval Greek revelatory texts are our main surviving source for what was once a vibrant and contentious tradition; its focal point was Constantinople, the Queen of Cities, which captivated the imagination of medieval travelers not only through its magnificent buildings but also through its geopolitical and soteriological significance. The Byzantines shared an elaborate and determined vision of the future, which was a bone of contention throughout the medieval period. Armenians, Latins, Slavs, and others all fiercely contested the Byzantine prerogative to produce the savior-emperor. Similar disputes ranged around the identity of the Antichrist. These debates and others were largely carried out in an exegetical framework of continuously (re)interpreting Biblical motifs and typologies. The soft power that Byzantium radiated throughout the millennium of its existence – together with the deep impact it had on medieval intellectual history – can hardly be understood without taking into consideration the Byzantine apocalyptic horizon of expectations.

The panel presents papers that investigate how prophecy-making influenced historical phenomena and vice versa, how exegetical techniques were employed to support implicit socio- political claims, and how prophetic texts presented modes of ‘managing’ (either by invoking or delaying) the drama of the apocalyptic future. It is the explicit aim of this panel to integrate references to the Latin West as well as the Muslim East wherever appropriate in order to reconstruct the global dimension of the Byzantine apocalyptic tradition.