Paradise, Death and Doomsday in Anglo-Saxon Literature

Preface; List of abbreviations; 1. Between Eden and Jerusalem, death and Doomsday: locating the interim paradise; 2. Assertions and denials: paradise and the interim, from the Visio Sancti Pauli to Aelfric; 3. Old hierarchies in new guise: vernacular reinterpretations of the interim paradise; 4. Description and compromise: Bede, Boniface and the interim paradise; 5. Private hopes, public claims? Paradisus and sinus Abrahae in prayer and liturgy; 6. Doctrinal work, descriptive play: the interim paradise and Old English poetry; 7. From a heavenly to an earthly interim paradise: toward a tripartite otherworld; Select bibliography; Index.

Dr Ananya Jahanara Kabir is currently Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. She was the recipient of a Radhakrishnan Scholarship to Oxford, an External Research Studentship to Trinity College Cambridge, an Honorary Scholarship and Life Fellowship of the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust, the Turville Petre Prize for Old Norse (Oxford) and the Dorothy Whitelock Studentship (Cambridge). Several articles on medieval and postcolonial subjects (as well as on their theoretical intersections) are forthcoming in academic journals such as Studies in Philology, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, Archiv fur das Studium der neuren Sprachen und Literaturen, The Upstart Crow, Interventions, and edited collections of essays.

"[Kabir's] methodology (literary analysis and source study) compels her to come to terms with the tensions between popular and learned culture, orthodox, and heterodox belief, as well as oral and literary expression. It is an important book, and provides a richly developed answer to an ostensibly simple question." Catholic Historical Review "Kabir is wide-ranging in her treatment of sources, yet focused an incisive in her analysis of the material relevant to her thesis. She demonstrates compellingly how and why the three-fold eschatological scheme, which became a doctrine in the thirteenth century, gradually replaced the older fourfold scheme." Catholic Historical Review "An important and thought-provoking contribution to research on early medieval world-views and patterns of imagination." Zeitschirft fuer Anglistik und Amerikanistik