Books about Apocalypses

Apocalyptic thinking was a common topic in Late Antiquity, reaching into the early Reformation. The following lists recent books outlining the history behind the topic and its different forms of artistic renditions

General Introductions

The Cambridge Companion to Apocalyptic Literature
By Collin McAllister
Cambridge University Press 2020

Jewish and Christian apocalypses have captivated theologians, writers, artists, and the general public for centuries, and have had a profound influence on world history from their initial production by persecuted Jews during the second century BCE, to the birth of Christianity – through the demise of the Western Roman Empire and the medieval period, and continuing into modernity. Far from being an outlier concern, or an academic one that may be relegated to the dustbin of history, apocalyptic thinking is ubiquitous and continues to inform nearly all aspects of modern-day life. It addresses universal human concerns: the search for identity and belonging, speculation about the future, and (for some) a blueprint that provides meaning and structure to a seemingly chaotic world. The Cambridge Companion to Apocalyptic Literature brings together a field of leading experts to provide a comprehensive overview of the subject.

The Oxford Handbook of Apocalyptic Literature (Oxford Handbooks)
Ed. by John J. Collins
Oxford University Press 2014

Apocalypticism arose in ancient Judaism in the last centuries BCE and played a crucial role in the rise of Christianity. It is not only of historical interest: there has been a growing awareness, especially since the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, of the prevalence of apocalyptic beliefs in the contemporary world. To understand these beliefs, it is necessary to appreciate their complex roots in the ancient world, and the multi-faceted character of the phenomenon of apocalypticism.

The Oxford Handbook of Apocalyptic Literature is a thematic and phenomenological exploration of apocalypticism in the Judaic and Christian traditions. Most of the volume is devoted to the apocalyptic literature of antiquity. Essays explore the relationship between apocalypticism and prophecy, wisdom and mysticism; the social function of apocalypticism and its role as resistance literature; apocalyptic rhetoric from both historical and postmodern perspectives; and apocalyptic theology, focusing on phenomena of determinism and dualism and exploring apocalyptic theology’s role in ancient Judaism, early Christianity, and Gnosticism.

The final chapters of the volume are devoted to the appropriation of apocalypticism in the modern world, reviewing the role of apocalypticism in contemporary Judaism and Christianity, and more broadly in popular culture, addressing the increasingly studied relation between apocalypticism and violence, and discussing the relationship between apocalypticism and trauma, which speaks to the underlying causes of the popularity of apocalyptic beliefs. This volume will further the understanding of a vital religious phenomenon too often dismissed as alien and irrational by secular western society.

The Oxford Handbook of the Book of Revelation
Ed. By Craig Koester ·
Oxford University Press 2020

The Book of Revelation holds a special fascination for both scholars and the general public. The book has generated widely differing interpretations, yet Revelation has surprisingly not been the focus of many single-volume reference works. The Oxford Handbook of the Book of Revelation fills a need in the study of this controversial book. Thirty essays by leading scholars from around the world orient readers to the major currents in the study of Revelation. Divided into five sections-Literary Features, Social Setting, Theology and Ethics, History of Reception and Influence, and Currents in Interpretation-the essays identify the major lines of interpretation that have shaped discussion of these topics, and then work through the aspects of those topics that are most significant and hold greatest promise for future research.

Expecting the End of the World in Medieval Europe: An Interdisciplinary Study
By Israel Sanmartín and Francisco Peña
Series: Apocalypse and the Global Middle Ages
Routledge 2024

Expecting the End of the World in Medieval Europe: An Interdisciplinary Study examines the phenomenon of medieval eschatology from a global perspective, both geographically and intellectually. The collected contributions analyze texts, authors, social movements, and cultural representations covering a wide period, from the 6th to the 16th century, in geographically liminal spaces where Catholic, Byzantine, Islamic, and Jewish cultures converged.

The book is organized in eleven chapters which reflect and explore the following arguments: the study of specific eschatological episodes in medieval Europe and their interpretations; the analysis of apocalyptic visionaries, apocalyptic authors, and their individual contributions; the social and political implications of eschatology in medieval society; the study of medieval apocalyptic literature from a rhetorical, narratological, and historiographical perspective; the history of the transmission of apocalyptic literature and its transformation over time; and a comparative examination of apocalypticism between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern era.

This study provides a lens through which academics, specialists, and interested researchers can observe and reflect on this entire eschatological universe, dwelling both on well-known texts, authors, and events, and on others which are much less popular. In gathering different paradigms, tools, and theoretical frameworks, the book exposes readers to the complex reality of medieval anxiety regarding the end of the world.

Peoples of the Apocalypse: Eschatological Beliefs and Political Scenarios
Ed. by by Wolfram Brandes et al
Series: Millennium-Studien / Millennium Studies Book 63
De Gruyter 2016

This volume addresses Jewish, Christian and Muslim future visions on the end of the world, focusing on the respective allies and antagonists for each religious society. Extensive lists of murderous end-time peoples, whether for good or evil, and those who merit salvation hold variably defined roles in end-time scenarios. Spanning late Antiquity to the early modern period, the collected papers examine distinctive aspects represented by each religion’s approach as well as shared concepts.

 

Retour vers le futur: l’apocalypse au Moyen Âge
By  Jean-Claude Schmitt
Nanterre (2024)

On February 24, 2022, Russian tanks entered Ukraine, beginning a war of unprecedented scale and violence in Europe since the Second World War. Suddenly, the theme of the apocalypse – to which the debates of recent years on global warming have accustomed us – took on a new face very close to us: that of total war, massive and systematic destruction, and the massacre of civilian populations. Here we are, despite ourselves, invited to “return” to the apocalypse. In this book, Jean-Claude Schmitt examines the theme of the apocalypse over the long term, from biblical texts to the political uses made of it during the Middle Ages.

Early Middle Ages

The Apocalypse in the Early Middle Ages Illustrated Edition
by James Palmer (Author)
Cambridge University Press; Illustrated edition
Cambridge University Press 2014

This groundbreaking study reveals the distinctive impact of apocalyptic ideas about time, evil and power on church and society in the Latin West, c.400–c.1050. Drawing on evidence from late antiquity, the Frankish kingdoms, Anglo-Saxon England, Spain and Byzantium and sociological models, James Palmer shows that apocalyptic thought was a more powerful part of mainstream political ideologies and religious reform than many historians believe. Moving beyond the standard ‘Terrors of the Year 1000’, The Apocalypse in the Early Middle Ages opens up broader perspectives on heresy, the Antichrist and Last World Emperor legends, chronography, and the relationship between eschatology and apocalypticism. In the process, it offers reassessments of the worlds of Augustine, Gregory of Tours, Bede, Charlemagne and the Ottonians, providing a wide-ranging and up-to-date survey of medieval apocalyptic thought. This is the first full-length English-language treatment of a fundamental and controversial part of medieval religion and society.

James Palmer undertook a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Nottingham in 2006–7 (on Time and Power in the Early Medieval West). In 2007 he was appointed Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of St Andrews, where he has taught widely on the Middle Ages, including a course on Medieval Apocalyptic Traditions. His well-reviewed first book on Carolingian hagiography, Anglo-Saxons in a Frankish World, 690–900, was published in 2009. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society the following year. In 2011–12 James held a much-sought-after ARHC Fellowship, which allowed him to complete his research for The Apocalypse in the Early Middle Ages. He was a founding editor of The Medieval Journal, an international forum for interdisciplinary medieval studies. He is also a member of the Medieval Academy of America and the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists.

Between Prophecy and Apocalypse: The Burden of Sacred Time and the Making of History in Early Medieval Europe
By Matthew Gabriele
Oxford University Press 2024

The tenth and eleventh centuries in medieval Europe are commonly seen as a time of uncertainty and loss: an age of lawless aristocrats, of weak political authority, of cultural decline and dissolute monks, and of rampant superstition. It is a period often judged from its margins, compared (mostly negatively) to what came before and what would follow. We impose upon it both a sense of nostalgia and a teleology, as they somehow knowingly foreshadow what is to come.

Seeking to complicate this mischaracterisation, which is primarily the invention of nineteenth and early twentieth century historiography, this book maps the movement between two intellectual stances: a shift from prophetic to apocalyptic thinking. Although the roots of this change lay in Late Antiquity, the fulcrum of this transition lies in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Biblical commentators in the fourth and fifth centuries enforced a particular understanding of sacred time that held until the ninth century, when exegetes of the ninth century found in their commentaries a different plan for God’s new chosen people. This came into stark relief as the new kingdom of Israel (the Frankish empire under the Carolingians) had splintered in the 840s. God was manifesting his displeasure with the chosen people by fire and sword.

What was perhaps unforeseen was that these commentaries that were written in the specific context of the Carolingian Civil War would be heavily copied and read for the next 200 years. Ideas that formed in a world that actively lamented the loss of empire had to be translated to a world that could only dream of that empire. As they spread across Europe, these ideas became the basis for monastic educational practices, and bled into other types of textual production, such as supposedly “secular” histories.

Between Prophecy and Apocalypse charts an intellectual transformation triggered when the prescriptions laid out towards the end of the Carolingian empire began to be “realized” in subsequent centuries. Nostalgia entwined with an attentiveness to possible futures and spun together so tightly as to become a double helix. Ultimately, this book will offer a way to understand the central Middle Ages, a period of dynamic intellectual ferment when ideas could inspire action and (seemingly banal) conceptions of time and history could inspire moments of dramatic transformation and horrific violence.
Matthew Gabriele is a professor of medieval studies at Virginia Tech. He has also been a visiting fellow at Westfälische Wilhelms Üniversität-Münster as well as at the University of St. Andrews, UK. He has published widely (for both academic and wider audiences) on religion, violence, nostalgia, and apocalypse, whether manifested in the European Middle Ages or modern world. Most recently, he co-authored with David M. Perry, The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe and is working with Perry on Oathbreakers: The Carolingian Civil War and the Collapse of an Empire in the Middle Ages.

Prophesy and Politics in the Early Carolingian World
By Andrew H. Sorber
Routledge 2024

Prophetic and apocalyptic rhetoric play critical roles in the development and articulation of political authority in the reigns of Charlemagne (d. 814) and Louis the Pious (d. 840). The rhetorical authority derived from claims of receiving revelation, interpreting divine communication, speaking for God, and foreseeing calamities became a competitive medium through which individuals legitimized political behaviour, debated their long- and short-term aspirations, and struggled for political supremacy. Ranging from claims of revelations, dreams, and visions, to the adoption of rhetorical voices based on biblical prophets, to the interpretation of signs and portents, prophetic rhetoric enjoyed extensive experimentation and varied application throughout early medieval political discourse.

Prophecy and Politics in the Early Carolingian World argues that claims of divine revelation, resistant to any attempts to monopolize them, provided a powerful means of speaking with authority for all participants in Frankish political discourse. This authority proved instrumental in the articulation and dismantling of effective Carolingian royal authority from 768 to 840. The volume introduces and reinterprets early Carolingian political discourse and intellectual activity, as well as the centrality of apocalypticism in the Carolingian period, by emphasizing prophecy, or revelation and authority, rather than prediction and calamity.

Early Carolingian political discourse was a dialogue that took place across royal proclamations, legal statements, historical texts, visions, scriptural commentaries, and manifestations of the natural world, and in this dialogue, the ability to interpret God’s will was as powerful as it was problematic.

Andrew Sorber is an assistant professor of Humanities and History at Southern Virginia University and the program coordinator for History. His research and teaching explore the religious, political, and intellectual history of the early medieval Mediterranean world, with topics including apocalypticism, polemics, interreligious understanding, debate, and conflict. His publications focus on issues of authority in Islamic al-Andalus and the Frankish kingdoms ruled by the Carolingians. He completed a bachelor’s degree in history at Brigham Young University, a master’s degree at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and a doctorate in medieval history at the University of Virginia.

Apocalyptic Thinking at the Turn of the Millenium

 

Art History

Apocalypse Illuminated: The Visual Exegesis of Revelation in Medieval Illustrated Manuscripts
By Richard K. Emmerson
Penn State University Press 2018

With its rich symbolism, complex narrative, and stunning imagery, the Apocalypse, or Revelation of John, is arguably the most memorable book in the Christian Bible. In Apocalypse Illuminated, Richard Emmerson explores how this striking visionary text is represented across seven centuries of medieval illustrations.

Focusing on twenty-five of the most renowned illustrated Apocalypse manuscripts, from the earliest extant Carolingian ones produced in the ninth century to the deluxe Apocalypse made for the dukes of Savoy and completed in 1490, Emmerson examines not only how they illustrate the biblical text, but also how they interpret it for specific and increasingly diverse audiences. He discusses what this imagery shows us about expectations for the Apocalypse as the year 1000 approached, its relationship to Spanish monasticism on the Christian-Muslim frontier and to thirteenth-century Joachimist prophetic beliefs, and the polemical reinterpretations of Revelation that arose at the end of the Middle Ages. The resulting study includes historical and stylistic comparisons, highlights innovative features, and traces iconographic continuities over time, including the recurring apocalyptic patterns, events, figures, and motifs that characterize Apocalypse illustrations throughout the Middle Ages.

Gorgeously illustrated and written in lively and accessible prose, this is a masterful analysis of over seven hundred years of Apocalypse manuscripts by one of the most preeminent scholars of medieval apocalypticism.

Late Middle Ages

A Companion to Popular Apocalypticism in the High and Late Middle Ages
Ed. by by Sally Mayall Brasher
Series: Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition
Brill August 2025

In this volume, apocalypticism and millenarianism in the high and late medieval era in Europe is examined as it was interpreted, expressed, and disseminated in popular culture by a variety of lay individuals, groups, and religious sects.

 

 

 

 

 

A Companion to the Premodern Apocalypse
Ed. by Michael A Ryan
Series: Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition, 64
Brill 2016

The final book of the New Testament, the Apocalypse, has been controversial since its initial appearance during the first century A.D. For centuries after, theologians, exegetes, scholars, and preachers have grappled with the imagery and symbolism behind this fascinating and terrifying book. Their thoughts and ideas regarding the apocalypse–and its trials and tribulations–were received within both elite and popular culture in the medieval and early modern eras. Therefore, one may rightly call the Apocalypse, and its accompanying hopes and fears, a foundational pillar of Western Civilization. The interest in the Apocalypse, and apocalyptic movements, continues apace in modern scholarship and society alike. This present volume, A Companion to the Premodern Apocalypse, collates essays from specialists in the study of premodern apocalyptic subjects. It is designed to orient undergraduate and graduate students, as well as more established scholars, to the state of the field of premodern apocalyptic studies as well as to point them in future directions for their scholarship and/or pedagogy.

Contributors are: Roland Betancourt, Robert Boenig, Richard K. Emmerson, Ernst Hintz, László Hubbes, Hiram Kümper, Natalie Latteri, Thomas Long, Katherine Olson, Kevin Poole, Matthias Riedl, Michael A. Ryan

Environmental Apocalyptic Thinking

A Philosophy of Climate Apocalypticism. In and Against the World
By Jakub Kowalewski
Routledge 2025

This book offers a long-overdue analysis of the ubiquity of eco-apocalypticism in current discourses on the climate crisis.

Drawing on a wide range of sources and theoretical traditions from ecological works and radical pamphlets, through political theology and continental philosophy to ancient and medieval apocalypses, the book sheds a comprehensive light on the concepts, processes, and experiences which circulate around the figure of the environmental end of the world. Importantly, this book argues that apocalypticism can provide a productive philosophical framework for addressing the climate catastrophe, enabling us to propose a distinctive answer to the fundamental question which haunts progressive ecological projects: how can we defend the world we find indefensible?

Appealing to students, academics, and researchers in philosophy, political theology, and environmental humanities, this book is a timely intervention which hopes to demonstrate that, when all else fails, it is the end of the world which may save the planet.

The Environmental Apocalypse 
Interdisciplinary Reflections on the Climate Crisis
Ed. by Jakub Kowalewski
Routledge 2022

This volume brings together scholars working in diverse traditions of the humanities in order to offer a comprehensive analysis of the environmental catastrophe as the modern-day apocalypse. Drawing on philosophy, theology, history, literature, art history, psychoanalysis, as well as queer and decolonial theories, the authors included in this book expound the meaning of the climate apocalypse, reveal its presence in our everyday experiences, and examine its impact on our intellectual, imaginative, and moral practices.

Importantly, the chapters show that eco-apocalypticism can inform progressively transformative discourses about climate change. In so doing, they demonstrate the fruitfulness of understanding the environmental catastrophe from within an apocalyptic framework, carving a much-needed path between two unsatisfactory approaches to the climate disaster: first, the conservative impulse to preserve the status quo responsible for today’s crisis, and second, the reckless acceptance of the destructive effects of climate change.

This book will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars interested in the contributions of both apocalypticism and the humanities to contemporary ecological debates.

FEATURED PHOTO:

Bamberger Apocalypse Folio 43, Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, MS A. II. 42 detail/ source; wikipedia