The History of the End of the World

Apocalypse. Ragnarok. Armageddon. Global Thermonuclear War. Catastrophic Climate Change. These are some of the many ways that people across time have conceptualized and feared the end of the world. This Core Topics course centers on the long European Middle Ages (c. 400-1500), exploring how imaginations of the end of world connected to very real, often traumatic environmental and religious changes occurring within multiple medieval societies. Students will engage directly with texts and archaeological material to explore pandemics, climate change, political collapse, and theological poetics across medieval Europe. The course concludes with a survey of post-medieval catastrophes, including the colonization of the Americas, the transatlantic slave trade, the Holocaust, and contemporary apocalypticism in film.