Prophetic Futures

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-v

   PDF

2. Prophetic histories, portentous figures

   • Joseph Bowling, Katherine Walker

   Pages 1-5

3. English political prophecy and the problem of modernity

   • Eric Weiskott

   Pages 7-20

4. The prophetess and the pope: St. Hildegard of Bingen, Pope Benedict XVI, and prophetic visions of church reform

   • Nathaniel M. Campbell

   Pages 21-34

5. Valencia’s miraculous prophet: The Inquisition dossier of Catalina Muñoz (1588)

   • Nicholas R. Jones

   Pages 35-48

6. Prophecy and emendation: Merlin, Chaucer, Lear’s Fool

   • Misha Teramura

   Pages 49-66

7. Wasting time in The Committee-man Curried

   • Marissa Nicosia

   Pages 67-80

8. The carcasse speakes’: Vital corpses and prophetic remains in Thomas May’s Antigone

   • Penelope Meyers Usher

   Pages 81-93

9. Prophecy and poetry: The Second World War and the turn to biblical typology in George Herbert’s The Temple

   • Martin Elsky

   Pages 95-110

10. Histories and temporalities past, present, and future Dennis Austin Britton

    • Dennis Austin Britton

    Pages 111-126

This book is based on the postmedieval journal special issue Prophetic Futures. It calls for renewed attention to prophecy and temporality, challenging in the process critical lenses that adhere to strict dualities of medieval/modern, superstitious/rationalized, and other problematic dyads that occlude our understanding of vatic language. The language, texts, and bodies of prophecy challenge commonplaces about a disenchanted modernity and point the way to new critical approaches to texts out of time. Previously published in postmedieval Volume 10, issue 1, March 2019.

• middle ages
• prophetic visions
• medievalisms
• figure of the prophet
• historicist methods

• University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, USA

  Joseph Bowling

• University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Las Vegas, USA

  Katherine Walker

Joseph Bowling Department of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA

Katherine Walker Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA