Early Byzantine Apocalyptic Discourses - (Brill's the Early Middle Ages) by Ryan W Strickler (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book offers a reconsideration of early Byzantine apocalypticism and its use to reshape Roman identity in the sixth and seventh centuries and provide hope in a period of crisis and loss.

Book Synopsis

The Byzantine Empire faced many threats, but few were as great as the events of the sixth and seventh centuries, when paranoia, plagues, and wars threatened to tear the empire apart. Like today, prophets predicted horrors to come while preachers called on their congregations to repent. This book considers how the Byzantines understood the crises of the period and their role in divine history by reframing their troubles through an apocalyptic lens. While most scholars have interpreted these messages as a prediction of the end, this book argues for a different reading, understanding them instead as messages of hope.

About the Author

Ryan W. Strickler, Ph.D. (2019), Macquarie University, is a lecturer in ancient history at the University of Newcastle (Australia). He studies identity formation and crisis response in the late Roman and Byzantine world, and recently co-edited Dissidence and Persecution in Byzantium: From Constantine to Michael Psellos (Brill, 2022).