Paradise, Death and Doomsday in Anglo-Saxon Literature: (Series Number 32 Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England)

How did the Anglo-Saxons conceptualize the interim between death and Doomsday? In this 2001 book, Ananya Jahanara Kabir presents an investigation into the Anglo-Saxon belief in the 'interim paradise': paradise as a temporary abode for good souls following death and pending the final decisions of Doomsday. She locates the origins of this distinctive sense of paradise within early Christian polemics, establishes its Anglo-Saxon development as a site of contestation and compromise, and argues for its post-Conquest transformation into the doctrine of purgatory. In ranging across Old English prose and poetry as well as Latin apocrypha, exegesis, liturgy, prayers and visions of the otherworld, and combining literary criticism with recent scholarship in early medieval history, early Christian theology and history of ideas, this book is essential reading for scholars of Anglo-Saxon England, historians of Christianity, and all those interested in the impact of the Anglo-Saxon period on the later Middle Ages.

Table of Contents:
Preface; List of abbreviations; 1. Between Eden and Jerusalem, death and Doomsday: locating the interim paradise; 2. Assertions and denials: paradise and the interim, from the Visio Sancti Pauli to Aelfric; 3. Old hierarchies in new guise: vernacular reinterpretations of the interim paradise; 4. Description and compromise: Bede, Boniface and the interim paradise; 5. Private hopes, public claims? Paradisus and sinus Abrahae in prayer and liturgy; 6. Doctrinal work, descriptive play: the interim paradise and Old English poetry; 7. From a heavenly to an earthly interim paradise: toward a tripartite otherworld; Select bibliography; Index.

About the Author :
Dr Ananya Jahanara Kabir is currently Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. She was the recipient of a Radhakrishnan Scholarship to Oxford, an External Research Studentship to Trinity College Cambridge, an Honorary Scholarship and Life Fellowship of the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust, the Turville Petre Prize for Old Norse (Oxford) and the Dorothy Whitelock Studentship (Cambridge). Several articles on medieval and postcolonial subjects (as well as on their theoretical intersections) are forthcoming in academic journals such as Studies in Philology, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, Archiv fur das Studium der neuren Sprachen und Literaturen, The Upstart Crow, Interventions, and edited collections of essays.

Review :
"[Kabir's] methodology (literary analysis and source study) compels her to come to terms with the tensions between popular and learned culture, orthodox, and heterodox belief, as well as oral and literary expression. It is an important book, and provides a richly developed answer to an ostensibly simple question." Catholic Historical Review "Kabir is wide-ranging in her treatment of sources, yet focused an incisive in her analysis of the material relevant to her thesis. She demonstrates compellingly how and why the three-fold eschatological scheme, which became a doctrine in the thirteenth century, gradually replaced the older fourfold scheme." Catholic Historical Review "An important and thought-provoking contribution to research on early medieval world-views and patterns of imagination." Zeitschirft fuer Anglistik und Amerikanistik