The Politics of Time: Epistemic Shifts and the Reception History of the Four Kingdoms Schema

Abstract

The articulation of time into discrete, meaningful periods is a powerful po-litical act. This essay surveys the use of the biblical four kingdoms schema as a time-structuring device at moments of socio-political rupture in Euro-pean history. In the wake of the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire, the four kingdoms schema provided a theological and intellectual ground-ing for a wide variety of claims to temporal sovereignty, both universal and local, as demonstrated by Eusebius, Paulus Orosius, Cassiodorus and Isidore of Seville. In the mediaeval period, as seen in the Hereford map of the world, the four kingdoms schema allowed scholars to produce new theories of divine sovereignty that legitimated specific secular authorities by means of a unified geographic-chronological progression of temporal power. In the transition to the Early Modern period, new forms of measuring and con-ceptualizing time as well as new theories of theo-political organization, par-ticularly in Protestant circles, found expression in shifting interpretive tra-jectories of the four kingdoms schema. This shift is witnessed by Conrad Dasypodius’s astronomical clock in Strasbourg, the concurrent pseudony-mous apocalyptic prophesies of Wilhelm Friess, and the revolutionary rhet-oric of Thomas Müntzer.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.