Invading in/from the 'Holy Land' : Apocalyptic Metatext(s) and Sacred and/or Imagined Geography, 950-1200

ISBN-13: 9783659471889 / Angielski / Miękka / 2013 / 108 str.

Tsvetelin Stepanov

Opis

Terms such as Holy Land and fear of the invaders before the End of Time have common literary base and, probably, common - historical and mental - roots, the latter being also connected with Apocalypse. With all this in mind, this book aims at posing one very important question, namely that of the connection between one s own Holy Land and the geographic locations of the invading Gog and Magog people . Who were all those invaders in reality; and were they always entering the Holy Land following the archetypical direction of the approaching punishment mentioned in the Bible? Such questions are directly connected to the notion of the sacred (real or imagined) geography of the chosen people and the location of the evil forces . The study therefore aims at exploring areas that so far have not been clarified enough. Research of this kind could show that one and the same cultural matrix, namely the Big Tradition of the three Abrahamic religions, is the source for similar ideas and notions about invading from/in the Holy Land . Hopefully a book of this kind will help some of the characteristics of the mental map of the Early Medieval Europe to be better understood.

O autorze

Dr. Tsvetelin Stepanov has obtained his PhD degree in History in 1997. Since the beginning of 1990s he has been working in the field of Medieval Studies (the Great Steppe, Bulgaria, Byzantium; otherness, power, apocalypse). He is the author of The Bulgars and the Steppe Empire in the Early Middle Ages: The Problem of the Others ( Brill , 2010).