Gardiner - Visions of heaven and hell before Dante

Visions of Heaven & Hell before Dante

Edited by Eileen Gardiner

ITALICA PRESS

NEW YORK

1989

The following volume presents a collection of twelve of the most important, best known, and most influential medieval visions of heaven and hell written before Dantes Divine Comedy. They are arranged chronologically from the apocalyptic books of the second and fourth centuries to the literary visions of northern Europe dating from the late thirteenth century.

Many of the visions collected here were most recently translated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and are now difficult to obtain. These have been edited to present readable versions of the texts for a contemporary audience. The translations from Latin of Tundales Vision and Wettis Vision are new; as with the other visions, however, the emphasis was on creating a readable text for a contemporary audience. Scholars wishing to refer to these visions should, of course, consult the original-language editions. Any extensive introductory material that was not part of the actual vision has been omitted. This material may often provide details about the composition of the vision but not about the vision itself.

The Notes provided for each vision present background information on the individual works. Entries in the Notes includes references to the primary sources for each vision. At the end of the Notes is an alphabetical list of many of the less-known visions that have been omitted from this collection. The Bibliography includes important secondary works on vision literature. This volume also includes a Glossary of Terms, particularly religious terms that may not be familiar to a general reader. In addition to proper names, the Index includes selected iconographic details from the otherworld descriptions.

Perhaps it is the state of the world, perhaps the state of the individual in contemporary mass society, but whatever it is, something is engendering a great interest in literature of the imagination literature presenting speculations on realms beyond our daily physical existence. Science Fiction is the most obvious and most popular manifestation of this trend, but the genre of imaginary travel literature, which has included works like Mandevilles Travels and Robinson Crusoe, is being regenerated with works like Jan Morris Last Letters from Hav and Italo Calvinos Invisible Cities.

If we examine further we find that each year many new scholarly books appear on out-of-body experiences, the concepts of heaven and hell, the devil, and mysticism.1 Scholars are examining these concepts and the function they serve as symbols and archetypes for the individual psyche and for society. As fascinating as all these subjects are, it is our purpose here to look more closely at only one manifestation of this type of literature medieval visions of heaven and hell. We conclude our study at Dante because The Divine Comedy was the culmination of the entire body of medieval imaginative literature on the subject of the otherworld. His systematization of the cosmology of the otherworld seems to have ended the speculation of the medieval mind on the topic.

The Genre

Visions of heaven and hell are narratives that attempt to describe the afterlife in terms of an otherworld, a world beyond this life. The subject of this collection, medieval Christian visions of heaven and hell, reflects the belief that at death the soul is separated from the body. It is then judged according to the life it has lived on earth and assigned a place in the otherworld until the Last Judgment, when it will be assigned its final place for all eternity.

The otherworld was certainly not an idea unique to Christianity. Otherworlds were constructed at earlier times and in other cultures, such as the Buddhist, Brahman, Persian, Egyptian, Jewish and Western Classical cultures. These cultures influenced Christianitys understanding2 of exactly what the otherworld was whether a place for only the gods, whether a place to which people travelled after death, a place where they might be punished and rewarded, or just a place of continued existence. Christianity also drew from these cultures a vocabulary for describing the physical appearance and geography of the otherworld whether it would contain rivers and bridges, pits and fires, flowers and fields, music, dancing and food. Such descriptions drew on a large body of sources, such as the Buddhist descriptions of hell, the Persian bridge of judgment, the visits to the underworld in Virgil and Homer, and the apocryphal Book of Enoch.

These visions also seem to have been influenced by the penitential literature that was of great importance especially in the early Irish tradition, with which many of these visions are associated.3 These penitentials were actual handbooks for confessors who regulated the repentance process in their communities. They were used from about the fifth century to the eleventh century, when they were incorporated into the emerging canon-law collections sanctioned by the church.

Until the mid-twelfth century there was no distinct place known as purgatory.4 The Christian otherworld included only heaven and hell. Purgation was, however, a part of the afterlife, and the place of purgation occupied the outer reaches of either hell or heaven, depending on whether the soul was good but not totally good or bad but not totally bad. The former might spend some time waiting outside the walls of heaven in wind and rain, while the latter might spend some time wading through fire and ice above the pit of hell. In the mid-twelfth century the concept of purgatory as a separate and distinct place was formalized, but the visions included here, those written after the Book of Revelation of John and before The Divine Comedy of Dante, concern themselves with only heaven and hell.

These visions were extremely popular literary works. They were often initially written as records of the vision itself. Later they might be modified or expanded. Because these visions were believed to be factual and not fictional, they were often also incorporated into chronicles of the period.5 They were obviously used as didactic pieces in the church and were therefore actively preserved and disseminated. Generally a vision would be translated into many different languages and spread in manuscript throughout Europe.

A good example of this process is evident in the literary life of Tundales Vision. The vision itself dates from 1149 and is said to have occurred in Ireland. During the following year an Irish monk who was travelling through Europe stopped at Regensburg in Bavaria and wrote down this vision in Latin at the request of the Abbess G. of a convent there. It was translated into German shortly thereafter. By the end of the fourteenth century it had been translated into at least thirteen languages, including Serbo-Croatian. Many of the manuscripts of Tundales Vision also include pious tracts, such as works on the nature of the Holy Eucharist. As late as 1400 there was a verse translation into Middle English. It preserves and elaborates the most fantastic details of this vision but minimizes the more theological issues. The vision had made its way back to the British Isles after a long and impressive career, but was now included in manuscripts with romances and other fictional works.6 Today there is hardly a medieval manuscript collection of any importance in Europe that does not contain at least one copy of this vision.