Celestial portents and apocalypticism in medieval Ireland
Celestial portents and apocalypticism in medieval Ireland
This chapter deals with Ireland from the 7th to the 12th centuries, which represents the oldest literary material from the medieval Celtic world. It shows that a conspicuously biblical paradigm for celestial portents held in the period. Churchmen recorded astronomical events throughout the early Middle Ages in the voluminous Irish annals, but their descriptions are coloured by the lurid apocalypticism characteristic of the early medieval Church. Thus comets and eclipses, for example, are transformed into ominous portents of Doomsday. The chapter then shows that this apocalyptic framework lies behind the depiction of heavenly portents in secular literature.
Keywords: Irish annals, comets, eclipses, portents, Doomsday, apocalypticism
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
