Abstract:

This workshop explores the complex and multifaceted interactions between apocalyptic thought, prophecy, eschatological expectations, biblical exegesis, and visual culture in South-Eastern Europe from the 15th to the early 19th century. Positioned at the crossroads of empires, confessions, and intellectual traditions, the region offers particularly fertile ground for examining how scriptural interpretation, prophetic discourse, and eschatological speculation intersected with political upheaval, religious reform, artistic production, and cultural exchange.

Apocalypticism, understood broadly as a mode of interpreting history through the lens of divine revelation and ultimate transformation, played a significant role in shaping the region’s religious, intellectual, and artistic life. Prophecy likewise provided a flexible language through which individuals and communities interpreted the past, made sense of contemporary crises, and imagined possible futures. In South-Eastern Europe, these traditions developed within a pluralistic environment marked by the coexistence and interaction of Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and Islamic communities. The workshop investigates how different groups engaged with biblical texts—especially prophetic and apocalyptic books such as Daniel, Ezekiel, and Revelation—and how their interpretations were articulated through commentaries, historical narratives, prophetic traditions, and iconographic programs.

A central concern of the workshop is the relationship between exegesis, prophecy, and historical experience. Interpreters, writers, and artists did not approach biblical texts and motifs in isolation, but their readings and representations were deeply embedded in the political, social, and confessional dynamics of their time. Ottoman expansion, Habsburg-Ottoman conflicts, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, dynastic change, and shifting patterns of patronage and intellectual exchange all contributed to heightened senses of historical urgency and eschatological expectation. Prophecies could be reinterpreted and adapted to explain political change, legitimize particular actors, identify enemies, or anticipate the collapse and renewal of empires and communities. The papers consider how such contexts shaped interpretations of figures and themes including beasts, Antichrists, tribulation, sacred cities, Enoch, and the end of dynasties—and how these interpretations, in turn, informed perceptions of crisis, identity, history, and destiny.

The workshop also foregrounds the transregional and transcultural dimensions of apocalyptic and prophetic thought. South-Eastern Europe functioned as a zone of intense intellectual and artistic circulation, in which ideas, texts, images, prophecies, and interpretive frameworks moved across linguistic, confessional, and imperial boundaries. Languages served as vehicles for the transmission and transformation of apocalyptic, prophetic, and exegetical traditions. By bringing together scholars working on diverse textual, historical, and visual corpora, the workshop seeks to foster a comparative perspective that highlights both shared patterns and distinctive local developments.