NCKU Professor Gives a Talk on Medieval Apocalyptic Imagination
May 28 2015 - 10:04PM
Business Wire
Professor Carolyn F. Scott from the Department of Foreign
Languages and Literature at National Cheng Kung University (NCKU),
Tainan, Taiwan, gave a talk on The Medieval Apocalyptic Imagination
at NCKU Library on May 25.
“People in the medieval period were worried about the same
things we’re worried about,” said Scott in her talk, adding,
“There’s disease, wars, chaos and disasters. What does that mean
and how does it teach us about where we are heading or what we
should be doing with our lives.”
She also said, “For the medieval people, it tended to either
focus them in the direction of becoming more religious, or of sort
of giving up. In our time, we can see kind of the same things
happening, that people who have religious faith find this difficult
time is a time when their faith becomes more important to them and
some other people feel more despair.”
“Medieval imagination might be a little more graphic,” said
Scott when she showed the audience some of the painting by
Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel, “but they are concerned about
the same things we are.”
“The idea of the Apocalypse comes from the Book of Revelation,
which is the last book of the Bible,” according to Scott, who
talked about the origin of the Apocalypse and some of its
features.
As part of the NCKU Library’s book exhibit on Disease, Disaster,
and the Apocalyptic Imagination, Scott introduced a book entitled
“Illuminating the End of Time: The Getty Apocalypse Manuscript” by
Nigel Morgan. The book has detailed descriptions of the Book of
Revelation, illuminating the End of Time and it offers an
introduction to the history of thirteenth-century English
illustrated Apocalypse manuscripts. This book and other books about
Bosch and Bruegel are part of a collection in the library made
possible by a grant from the Ministry of Science and
Technology.
When interpreting Bosch’s painting of The Last Judgment, she
said, “The imagery he picks for his images of heaven and hell are
very interesting and very modern in some ways.”
“His paintings show a reflection of the Medieval Apocalyptic
imagination, of what people back then believed it would be like at
the end of time,” according to Scott.
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