IMC 2024: Sessions

Crises can disrupt existing temporalities, the relationships between ideas of past, present and future. New historical theories, influenced by climate change, the Anthropocene and Covid-19, propose to enrich our understanding of these temporalities. So far, the integration of such theories into medieval history has been lacking despite the fundamental role played by the crisis in medieval culture. Medieval thinkers, however, both attempted to predict future crises and reflected on the implications of experienced crises for their imagined futures. While this was often done within the framework of the dominant religion - scriptural exegesis, salvation history or visionary experiences - others turned to less orthodox methods, including astrology, divination, dreams and other “magical” means. Such methods were used to try to predict future crises to warn others, to prepare for such events, or to understand one’s place in divine plans and the universe. This session aims to open up a broader reflection on future thinking and crisis in the Middle Ages. To this end, we bring together papers that explore different ways of looking at the future in the past, looking at different domains of medieval life, from apocalyptic prophecies to crisis management in merchants’ correspondence. In this first session we consider political prophecies.