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  • The Empire and the End of Time: Identity and Reform in Late Medieval Prophecy by Frances Courtney Kneupper
  • Carme Font Paz
Frances Courtney Kneupper, The Empire and the End of Time: Identity and Reform in Late Medieval Prophecy (New York: Oxford University Press 2016) viii + 259 pp.

Interest in Medieval prophecy as a characteristic quality of most religious writing in Europe has long caught the attention of scholars studying the intersections of mysticism, exegesis, and politics. Case studies on prophetic rhetoric and poetry are rightly considered from the viewpoint of a long trail of religious expression that spans centuries and manifests itself in different fashion according to the particular socio-political circumstances of the prophet. Jan Wojcik and Raymond-Jean Frontain, with Poetic Prophecy in Western Literature (1984), Marjorie Reeves, in The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages (1969), or Christian Prophecy and the Post Biblical Tradition, by Niels Christian Hvidt (2011) provide in-depth analyses of the influence of prophetic thought in theology, politics, and literature.

Prophets are inspired spokespersons of God, they may receive visions, warn about future events and, above all, provide instruction or admonition. The national and reformist character of prophecy is also well-documented, and even gathered momentum after the Reformation in the seventeenth century and beyond as a genre that coalesced old prophetic sentiment with political vindication in early modernity. However, much remains to be done on how this transition between old and early modern prophecy influenced national conscience on the eve of the Protestant Reformation in different European regions, and most appropriately, in the German Roman Empire.

Frances Courtney Kneupper delves into the textuality of late medieval prophecy in the German-speaking territories from 1380 to 1480 to bring to life the ways these texts articulated an identity for citizens of the German Empire as reformers of Christianity at the "End of Time." Kneupper follows a detailed analysis and close-reading methodology that illuminate the nuances of meaning and the full force of a well-chosen corpus of manuscript material that contains original or adapted prophecies in Late Medieval Upper-German-Speaking Europe. Her mapping out of eschatological thought either circulating or originating in these territories, with precise data about content, provenance, context, and physical description, are one of the most attractive features of Kneupper's study put together as an Appendix, which even includes a short reference to lost manuscripts.

Kneupper follows on the familiar trail of seeking the connection between German political identity and Church reform, but she does so in the prophetic texts themselves, drawing meaningful associations between the imaginative, dark, and eschatological prophetic themes and the staple warnings about the chastisement of the clergy, the murder of clerics and the much-needed restructuring of the Church. Far from being ignored by both the popular classes and the elite, these prophecies attracted widespread interest, in part because they circulated in German and Latin and were verbalized in a language understandable to the non-elite. The vernacular zeal ran parallel with the growth of prosperous cities in the southern regions of the empire, particularly Augsburg and Nürnberg with their independent population of city dwellers, some of them earning incomes and investing in education. Prophecies were also translated into the vernacular to cater to the demands of a growing half-literate [End Page 224] audience who was fond of listening to texts being read aloud or in a group. These factors (urban growth, literacy, reform, and the politics of the Empire) intersected with and influenced contemporary prophetic thought. Kneupper examines the interplay of these elements as they are represented in her chosen corpus of prophetic case studies—the Gamaleon prophecy, the Letter of Brother Sigwalt, the Auffahrt Abend prophecy, and the Wirsberger letters—while offering an introductory chapter on their overall audience and reception. Given the fluidity of prophetic texts, copyists were often uncertain of the context in which they would classify them and make them known. They were not sermons or magical texts, but their audiences understood them as such, and used them as informative pieces of warning with a sense of history—private, communal and national. The prophecies themselves were less engaged in Biblical intertextuality...

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