Revealing Doomsday: The History of Apocalypse in the West

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The history of Christian Apocalypse is about trying to place humanity in linear time. It is about bodily death, the end of the world, and immortality of the soul. But it is also about rebirth. These concepts have shaped European cultures, societies, and discourse for centuries. Apocalypse has been used to help us make sense of the events unfolding around us, from the turn of the Millennium, to the Black Death, to Y2K and COVID-19. This course will ask where our images of Apocalypse come from, why it exploded in popularity during the Middle Ages, and how those medieval developments in apocalypticism remain deeply ingrained in our world today.