shall be called the son of perdition. He will have wizards, witch doctors, diviners, and enchanters who will educate him in every iniquity, falsehood, and malefic art.

In the twelfth century Hildegard of Bingen will write that the son of perdition will come with all the wiles of the first seduction, and monstrous turpitudes, and black iniquities, with eyes of fire, ass’s ears, the muzzle and mouth of a lion; and, inducing humankind to renounce God, he will smother their senses with the most horrendous stench, snarling with an enormous grimace and displaying his fearsome iron fangs (Liber Scivias III, 1, 14).

The popularity of the figure of the Antichrist is no doubt partly to be ascribed to the millennialist anxieties we have outlined. If we hope, however, to fully account for these anxieties, and with them for the success of Beatus, we must take into consideration, in addition to these theological considerations and a taste for symbolic storytelling, the material circumstances that went along with the state of crisis that was the life of the High Middle Ages. Beatus was not regaling his readers with happenings that might occur a few years or 1,000 years into the future, but with happenings that people in those still dark ages were accustomed to experiencing on a daily basis. We have only to read Benedictine Rodulfus Glaber’s account in his Historiarum libri of events that occurred, not in Beatus’s time, but after the millennium was already thirty years into the past, at the start of the year 1033. Rodulfus describes a famine brought on by weather so inclement that, as a result of the flooding, it was impossible to find a favorable moment either to sow or to reap. Hunger had made the entire populace, rich and poor alike, completely emaciated and, when there were no more live animals to eat, they were compelled to eat corpses “and other things it is too repugnant even to mention,” to such a point that some people were reduced to devouring human flesh. Travelers were waylaid, murdered, cut into pieces, and roasted, and people who had left their homes in the hope of escaping the penury had their throats slit during the night by those who had offered them shelter. People even lured in children, offering them a piece of fruit or an egg, only to slaughter them and eat them.

In many localities corpses were dug up and eaten. Someone was discovered to have brought roasted human flesh to the market in Tournus and was burned at the stake; someone else suffered an identical fate because he went out at night in search of the place where the same meat had been buried. In a word, “that insane fury spread so far that abandoned cattle were safer from being carried off than were human beings” (Historiarum liber IV, 9–10).

Perhaps Rodolfus was still under the influence of his reading of Beatus. Otherwise it is difficult to understand how such horrible things could come to pass in the year 1033, since Rodulfus had earlier exulted (in book III, iv, 13) that in 1003 the rebirth of Europe had begun “shaking off, as it were, and ridding itself of its former senility, it had put on a pure white mantle of churches.” But that was how Rodolfus was: in book V he will also narrate how the Devil once appeared to him. A sure sign that, after the year 1000 had gone by, people were laughing on one side of their faces to have come through unscathed and weeping on the other for fear their calculations were off and something even worse was still about to happen. But when he is not seeing the Devil but simply looking around him, Rodulfus seems to be a reliable chronicler. So his tales of hard times have an aura of truth.

What is to prevent, then, in times dominated by such a sense of insecuritas, the scholar reading Beatus, or the unlettered masses listening to someone else read Beatus, or seeing the same horrors depicted on the frescoed walls of their churches, thinking, along with Horace, “de te fabula narratur” (“this could be your story”)? Even in our own day, on the silver screen, stories involving cataclysms and disasters that hold out no hope for the future but fuel (or hypnotically sublimate) our night sweats and nightmares continue to garner success.

A reworking of my essay “Palinsesto su Beato” (Eco 1973), a commentary that first appeared in the sumptuously illustrated Franco Maria Ricci edition of Beato di Liébana (1973), and “Jerusalem and the Temple as Signs in Medieval Culture,” in Manetti (1996: 329–344). [Translator’s note: English citations from the Apocalypse are from the King James Version (KJV)].

1. For the differences between metaphor and allegory, see Chapter 3 in the present volume.
2. References for the citations from Beatus’s Commentarius that follow are to the critical edition by Sanders (1930) (S followed by the page number) as well as to that of the 1985 Poligrafico dello Stato edition (B followed by the page number). For a monumental five-volume illustrated catalogue of the illustrations, see Williams 1994–2005.
3. The illuminations in the Beatus manuscripts have a preeminent place in the development of the figurative arts of the Middle Ages. Their influence spread along the “ways of Saint James,” along the four roads, that is, which criss-crossed Europe and were taken by pilgrims on their pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Along these roads the great abbey churches of the Romanesque period rose. The churches fulfilled several functions: organizational, hospitable, liturgical, and especially didactic. The church itself was, so to speak, a book made out of stone. The figures on its portals and capitals told the believers stopping there all they needed to know for the salvation of their souls: the mysteries of the faith, the precepts of virtuous behavior, the phenomena of nature, the elements of a more or less fabulous geography, tall tales of exotic peoples and monstrous creatures. For a long time, the West, having emerged from the Middle Ages, lost the knack of deciphering the meanings of many of these representations, so obvious to the medieval spectator or reader. It will be art historian Emile Mâle (1922, vol. I, ch. 2) who will identify the references to the Apocalypse that have their source in the illuminated Beati. See also Focillon (1938).
4. Huysmans 2003, p. 39.
5. The rules, set forth in the Liber regularum (and discussed at length by Augustine in his De doctrina christiana III, 30–37) are: 1. “Of the Lord and his Body”: Christ is sometimes presented as the head of the Church and sometimes as the Church itself, his Mystical Body. 2. “On the Double Body of Christ”: a somewhat obscure rule, partly because Augustine, in his commentary, taken up, for example, by the Venerable Bede, outmaneuvers Donatist Tyconius, seizing the occasion to interpret him in an anti-Donatist key: it is not true that only the just belong to the Church and are worthy of administering the sacraments, instead the Church is a Corpus Permixtum, made up, that is, of good and bad members, whom God will separate on the Day of Judgment; for now, the Church is “bipartite.” 3. “On Promises and the Law” deals with the discussion of grace versus good works. 4. “Of Species and Genus”: Holy Scripture sometimes speaks of a specific entity designating by metonymy the vaster genus: it says “Jerusalem” or “Solomon” and means the Church and all its members. 5. “Of the Times”: based explicitly on the principle of synecdoche or the part for the whole—the Apocalypse speaks of 144,000 elect to indicate the assembly of all the Saints, who are somewhat more, and it speaks of times in the same way. 6. “Of Recapitulation”: sometimes the author of Scripture lists a temporal sequence of events, then he adds one that seems to be the continuation of the series but is in fact their recapitulation or the repetition of something already said (this is a rule that helps overcome the sense of flashback that the Apocalypse communicates to the reader when certain events appear to occur twice). 7. “Of the Devil and his Body”: repeats the rule, once more metonymical, according to which we speak of Christ as both head and body of the community of the Elect.
6. [Translator’s note: Unless otherwise attributed, translations of Italian secondary sources, here and elsewhere, are my own, from Eco’s text.]
7. The Latin version of the Apocalypse quoted by Beatus (Commentarius III, S266, B442, S267, B459) is slightly different from the Vulgate but the basic sense is the same, as is the case with the KJV. We reproduce here Beatus’s Latin source text along with the corresponding text from the KJV (which we already followed closely in the body of the chapter): “Et ecce thronus positus erat in caelo, et supra thronum sedens, et qui sedebat similis erat aspectui lapidi iaspidis et sardino; et iris in circuito sedis, similis aspectui zmaragdino; et in circuitu throni vidi sedes viginti quattuor, et supra sedes viginti quattuor seniores sedentes in veste alba, et in capitibus eorum coronas aureas. Et de sede procedunt fulgura et voces et tonitrua. Et septem lampades ignis ardentis, qui sunt septem spiritus Dei. Et in conspectu throni sicut mare vitreum simile cristallo. Et vidi in medio throni et in circuito throni quattuor animalia plena oculia ante et retro. Animal primum simile leonis, et secundum animal simile vituli, et tertium animal habens faciem hominis, et quartum animal simile ad aquilae volantis. Haec quattuor animalia singula eorum habebant alas senas: et in circuitu et intus plena sunt oculis” (“And, behold, a throne was set in heaven, and one sat