Doubt, Faith, and the World to Come in Peter of Cornwall's Book of Revelations

This dissertation explores the relationship between doubt and faith as it appears in a large collection of visions and revelations from the turn of the thirteenth century, entitled the Liber revelationum, or the Book of Revelations. The Liber revelationum was compiled in London by an Augustinian canon named Peter of Cornwall around the year 1200. He collected scores of visions and revelations from books, friends, and acquaintances in order to prove that angels, God, and the human soul existed. My work focuses on the first book of the collection dealing with proofs for life after death. This study explores the context of this manuscript both in Peter’s works and also in the larger twelfth-century literary genres in which it participates. I interrogate the various means by which the spiritual world is revealed to the living. I question what exactly about the spiritual world is revealed, and what specific doubts these revelations address. Finally, I explore the culture of desire for contact with the spiritual world at the turn of the thirteenth century that is glimpsed through Peter’s collection and its immediate sources. Peter’s work results from what he took as a central epistemological problem facing human beings: as a result of sin, humanity has lost the ability to directly know God. As a result, it is natural to doubt His existence as He cannot be known through experience. Peter’s revelations address this doubt. I analyze the ways in which visions and revelations in their response to these doubts run up against recurrent restrictions and frustrations due to the very epistemological limitations that inspire them. These very shortcomings played a role in the process of faith to the religious culture around visions and the desire for them around the year 1200. This faith, which also required a similar separation from the divinity, exists in the same space as visionary and revelatory experience, defined by humanity’s limited ways of knowing and desire for a seemingly infinitely deferred transcendence. I argue that experiential medieval religion and belief, as glimpsed in Peter’s collection, requires and is enriched by doubt as well as challenged by it.

Department dc:contributor.department

Medieval Studies

Year dc:date.issued

2013

Author dc:creator

• Barbezat, Michael

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Goering, Joseph

• Belief and Doubt
• Visions in Literature
• Soul in Literature
• Christian Literature, Latin (Medieval)

Language dc:language.iso

en_ca

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/70049

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/70049