Description: This volume takes up the challenge implied in Augustine's paradox of time: How does one account for the continuity of history and the certitude of memory, if time, in the guise of an indivisible "now," cuts off any extension of the present? The thinkers and artists the essays address include Augustine, Abelard, Eriugena and Thoreau, Calvin, Shakespeare, De Rance, Stravinsky and Messiaen, Rubens and Woolf.
Brief description: Babette Hellemans earned her PhD at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and Utrecht University. She is currently Assistant Professor in History at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Hellemans has published on historiographical and intellectual themes such as the anthropology of eschatology in Western medieval culture, including modern theories of temporality, semantics, and images. She is the author of La Bible Moralisée: une oeuvre à part entière. Temporalité, sémiotique et création au XIIIe siècle (Brepols 2010). At present she is completing a monograph, Peter Abelard (1079-1142) and the Varieties of the Self: An Intellectual Biography.
Review Quotes: This creatively eclectic volume launches a bold experiment in exploring what it might mean to take Augustine's aporetic and non-linear understanding of time and eternity seriously. The questions posed are simultaneously historiographical and literary, on the one hand, and philosophical and theological, on the other. In exploring the relation between religion and pastness, the authors shuttle backward and forward in time, traverse theological and religious differences, and consider works of music and painting alongside those of literature and philosophy. At their best, the essays are fresh, insightful, moving--and challenging.-----Virginia Burrus, Drew University