ABSTRACT
Jeffrey Burton Russell’s words capture the expansive idea of heaven in the Middle Ages and its shifting shapes across different times and different cultures. Many religions have posited ‘heavens’ of some kind;2 and even when we concentrate on a single religion, pre-reformation Christianity, and a single period, the Middle Ages, we discover that the idea of heaven in the Middle Ages was as varied as the people who wrote about it. There was no one heaven, but a polyphony of heavens. Furthermore, because ‘the reality’ of heaven was one based on speculation as well as fancy, medieval heavens were products both of ingenious thought and of creative wishful imagination.
