Paradise, Death and Doomsday in Anglo-Saxon Literature

How did the Anglo-Saxons conceptualize the interim between death and Doomsday? In this 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.

• Provides a systematic investigation into a concept widely attested in Anglo-Saxon writings and crucial to understanding the early medieval world view • Demonstrates cultural links between Anglo-Saxon England and Continental Europe from Late Antiquity to post-Conquest period • The interdisciplinary approach and chronological range makes this important reading for early and late medievalists, literary critics, historians and theologians

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.