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In the twenty-first century, insurance companies still refer to "acts of God" for any accident or event not influenced by human beings: hurricanes, floods, hail, tsunamis, wildfires, earthquakes, tornados, lightning strikes, even falling trees. The remote origin of this concept can be traced to the Hebrew Bible. During the Second Temple period of Judaism a new literary form developed called "apocalyptic" as a mediated revelation of heavenly secrets to a human sage concerning messages that could be cosmological, speculative, historical, teleological, or moral. The best-known development of this type of literature, however, came to fruition in the New Testament and is, of course, the Book of Revelation, attributed to the apostle John, and which figures prominently in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. This collection of essays, the result of the 2014 ACMRS Conference, treats the topic of catastrophes and their connection to apocalyptic mentalities and rhetoric in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (with particular reference to reception of the Book of Revelation), both in Europe and in the Muslim world. The twelve authors contributing to this volume use terms that are simultaneously helpful and ambiguous for a whole range of phenomena and appraisal. -- The rhetoric of catastrophe in eleventh-century medieval Ireland : the case of the Second Vision of Adomnán / Nicole Volmering -- The Virgin Mary and the last judgment in the old Norse-Icelandic Maríu saga / Daniel Najork -- Personalized eschatology and Lorraine apocalypses, ca. 1295-1320 / Karlyn Griffith -- William Langland's uncertain apocalyptic prophecy of the Davidic king / Kimberly Fonzo -- Res papirea and the catastrophic arrival of the antichrist / Alison Beringer -- Consider this tomb : an unedited Italian sonnet about death and final judgment / Fabian Alfie -- "The lesser day of resurrection" : Ottoman interpretations of the Istanbul earthquake of 1509 / H. Erdem Çipa -- Pieter Bruegel's Towers of Babel : spirals toward destruction / Catherine Shultz McFarland -- Inhuman rage : linguistic apocalypse in a sixteenth-century Huguenot poetic commemoration of the sack of Lyon / Evan J. Bibbee -- Fire in the sky : celestial omens of catastrophe in a French renaissance painting / Katrina Klaasmeyer -- The wrath of God and the soul on trial : late medieval and Puritan eschatological fears and the clerical uses of apocalyptical imagery / Joanna Miles (Ludwikowska) -- The apocalyptic legacy of pseudo-Ephraem in Russia : the Sermon on the Antichrist / J. Eugene Clay.
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