ABSTRACT
The Life, and the works of Abbot Elfric, thus offer windows into eschatological thought-worlds, allowing glimpses of the world to come through the eyes of two tenth-century individuals who experienced the first millennium drawing to a close in quite different contexts, at opposite ends of Europe. The separation of eschatology, the study of the Last Things, into individual and apocalyptic strands is to some extent an issue of modern scholarship rather than medieval thought. Christian eschatology encompasses apocalypse and apocalyptic expectation of the world’s end alongside the death of the individual and the afterlife, both temporary and eternal. Elfric’s beliefs about immediate eschatology, the fate of the soul in the interim, are intimately bound up with his understanding of ultimate or apocalyptic eschatology, what happens at the end of time. Elfric’s source for the major part of the sermon was the Prognosticum futuri saeculi of the late seventh-century Spanish theologian, Julian of Toledo.
