Alexander the Minorite and the Victoria & Albert Altarpiece, and the Crusades: Rewriting the Past and Future of Crusade History

In thirteenth-century Germany, a friar wrote an entirely original commentary on the Book of Revelation in which the Crusades played a major role in the course of prophetic history. It is preserved in a handful of lavishly illustrated manuscripts, whose images in the fourteenth century were painted onto a massive altarpiece now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. There was just one problem. Once Alexander got to his own present-day, his predictions started to go badly wrong. This lecture will examine how his critics and commentators, including the artist responsible for the altarpiece, tried to preserve the substance of Alexander’s commentary despite its manifold shortcomings. On one point Alexander and his revisionists all agreed: The last important events in apocalyptic history were the crusades

Professor Jay Rubenstein is Professor of History and Religion and Director of the Center for the Premodern World at the University of Southern California.

Bookings for this session will close 24 hours in advance, so that seminar convenors can distribute the meeting link.