Heaven, hell and purgatory: 1100–1500

Abstract

Religious authorities, who were often political powers too, functioned at all levels, from the papacy to the parish, and also shaped personal attitudes towards heaven and hell. The chapter discusses hopes, fears and calculations of the religious community. In the centuries from 1100 to 1500, Christian ideas about the afterlife trace three great developments. The first is the democratisation of conscience. Second is the increased focus on 'the interim', the time between one's death and the general resurrection and Last Judgement at Christ's Second Coming. Third, as time passed, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, purgatory, suffrages and issues related to the interim became problematic in their own way. Another stabilising influence from the early Middle Ages is an analogy that informs virtually all medieval eschatology. Saint Patrick's Purgatory publicises a place to which the penitent might travel in order to structure their repentance. Beneath the level of papal declarations, Parisian theologians worked to articulate a consistent afterlife.

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