Brill's Series on the Early Middle Ages32 Byzantine Apocalyptic Discourses

This book offers a reconsideration of early Byzantine apocalypticism and its use to reshape Roman identity in the sixth and seventh centuries and provide hope in a period of crisis and loss. The Byzantine Empire faced many threats, but few were as great as the events of the sixth and seventh centuries, when paranoia, plagues, and wars threatened to tear the empire apart. Like today, prophets predicted horrors to come while preachers called on their congregations to repent. This book considers how the Byzantines understood the crises of the period and their role in divine history by reframing their troubles through an apocalyptic lens. While most scholars have interpreted these messages as a prediction of the end, this book argues for a different reading, understanding them instead as messages of hope.