Apocalypse, eschatology and the interim in England and Byzantium in the tenth and eleventh centuries

This article compares the representations and discussion of the afterlife in the works of Ælfric of Eynsham, an English monk of the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, with those in the Life of Saint Basil the Younger, written in Constantinople in the mid tenth century. Both Ælfric and the author of the Life of Basil offer windows into eschatological thought-worlds, allowing glimpses of the world to come through the eyes of two tenth-century individuals who experienced the first millennium drawing to a close in quite different contexts, at opposite ends of Europe. Both writers operated in a climate of heightened apocalypticism, which was felt across Europe in the latter part of the tenth century and into the eleventh, and which shows its presence in the sources in a variety of ways. At precisely the same time as this heightened apocalypticism, however, there was also increasing concern for the immediate fate of the soul in the afterlife, in the period between the death of the individual and the general judgement. The comparison of the aims and ideas of these authors offers a way into understanding a fundamental problem in apocalypticism, that is, the problem of what happens when the anticipated and supposedly imminent end of the world continues not to come. In addition, it identifies different responses to growing interest in the interim fate of the soul: while this remained somewhat ill-defined in the eastern tradition, writers in the western tradition increasingly discussed purgatory as the likely fate for the souls of the ordinary dead.