Berengaudus

Berengaudus is a name attached to a book, and the man behind the name is genuinely hard to see. The traditional account makes him a Benedictine monk of the abbey of Ferrières in the ninth century, on the strength of two letters in which Lupus of Ferrières recommends a young monk of that name to the abbey of Saint-Germain at Auxerre. On that reckoning he died around 892. Some scholars have argued instead that the commentary reads like eleventh- or twelfth-century work, since no surviving manuscript is older than the eleventh century and the book was only widely copied after 1100. Others have pushed back and defended the Carolingian date, pointing to how closely the commentary tracks the exegesis of Haimo of Auxerre. The dating is not settled. The book is. The Expositio super septem visiones libri Apocalypsis — an exposition of the seven visions of the book of Revelation — divides the Apocalypse into seven visions and works through them at length. Berengaudus reads the book as a compressed history of the whole people of God: the visions run from the beginning of the world to the last judgment, and he finds in them Adam and the patriarchs, the prophets, the apostles, the martyrs, and the church of his own day. He is more interested in the sweep of redemption than in identifying the beast with any particular ruler. He wrote with unusual freedom, paraphrasing his sources rather than stitching them together as most commentators of his era did. That looseness is one of the reasons his date is disputed, and one of the reasons he is readable. What is not in doubt is how much medieval England loved him. From the thirteenth century onward, when English workshops produced the great illustrated Apocalypse manuscripts — some of the most beautiful books made in the Middle Ages, with a full-page painting for nearly every scene — the text they set beside the pictures was very often Berengaudus. The Trinity Apocalypse, the Gulbenkian Apocalypse, and a whole family of related manuscripts carry his commentary. Painters worked from his explanations; readers learned to see Revelation through his eyes. For a long time his exposition was printed among the works of Ambrose, which is how a good many readers met it without ever learning his name. Sources: Berengaudus, Expositio super septem visiones libri Apocalypsis (Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. 17); Derk Visser, Apocalypse as Utopian Expectation (800–1500); Nigel Morgan, The Douce Apocalypse; Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages.