I Segni premonitori del Giudizio Universale in un inedito testo tedesco del XV secolo

Abstract

Numerous lists of the premonitory signs of the Last Judgment and wider narratives focussing on the same motif, which presents variants and articulated typologies, circulated throughout the Middle Ages, both in Latin and in the vernacular languages. Also in Germany the motif continues to be present in literature up to the threshold of the modern age, with the Lutheran Reform which is, also in this case, a watershed. The purpose of the contribution is the philological-literary analysis of a prose composition, in late German, devoted to the 15 Signs of Judgment, still unpublished, preserved in the ms. München, BStB cgm 522 (ff. 163v-166v), datable around 1470. The codex contains a miscellany of apocalyptic content, which also includes texts on the coming of the antichrist and on the Sibylline oracles. The text to be analysed is part of a more extensive work on the theme of the Last Judgment. The manuscript also contains an interesting set of illustrations relating to the events to which each of the Signs of Judgment alludes. The study aims to investigate the textual and thematic peculiarities of this version of the 15 Signs, also in the light of the codicological context, as well as the relationship with the wider eschatological literary tradition of the German Middle Ages.