Prophetic Futures

This book is based on the postmedieval journal special issue Prophetic Futures. It calls for renewed attention to prophecy and temporality, challenging in the process critical lenses that adhere to strict dualities of medieval/modern, superstitious/rationalized, and other problematic dyads that occlude our understanding of vatic language. The language, texts, and bodies of prophecy challenge commonplaces about a disenchanted modernity and point the way to new critical approaches to texts out of time. Previously published in postmedieval Volume 10, issue 1, March 2019.

Prophetic histories, portentous figures, Joseph Bowling & Katherine Walker.- English political prophecy and the problem of modernity, Eric Weiskott.- The prophetess and the pope: St. Hildegard of Bingen, Pope Benedict XVI, and prophetic visions of church reform, Nathaniel M. Campbell.- Valencia’s miraculous prophet: The Inquisition dossier of Catalina Muñoz (1588), Nicholas R. Jones.- Prophecy and emendation: Merlin, Chaucer, Lear’s Fool, Misha Teramura.- Wasting time in The Committee-man Curried, Marissa Nicosia.- ‘The carcasse speakes’: Vital corpses and prophetic remains in Thomas May’s Antigone, Penelope Meyers Usher.- Prophecy and poetry: The Second World War and the turn to biblical typology in George Herbert’s The Temple, Martin Elsky.- Histories and temporalities past, present, future, Dennis Austin Britton.

Joseph Bowling Department of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA

Katherine Walker Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA