The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Long Middle
Berengaudus
died 892Patristic
He left a long picture-by-picture commentary on Revelation that medieval readers could not put down.
Pictured: the era he stood in — Wycliffe Giving 'The Poor Priests' His Translation — W. F. Yeames, public domain
Summary
- Lived died 892.
- Stood in The Long Middle (AD 600–1500).
- Hangs on The Fathers.
- Tradition: Patristic / Western.
The life
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.
What was happening while he lived1 moments · AD 600–1500
- 863Cyril and Methodius go to the SlavsTwo brothers from Thessalonica invent an alphabet so Slavic peoples can read Scripture and worship in their own speech. They are opposed by churchmen who insist only Hebrew, Greek, and Latin are holy tongues; in 868 the pope backs the brothers. Everything Wycliffe and Tyndale later fight for is already in this decision.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Berengaudus at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Left a long picture-by-picture commentary on Revelation that medieval readers could not put down.
Hangs on The Fathers: The men who carried the faith out of the apostles' hands, and wrote down what they had received.
Standing beside himThe Long Middle · 51 on this stretch of wall
Asked why God became man, and answered it so well the question has never gone away since.
Wrote England's first history from inside a Northumbrian monastery and dated everything from the birth of Christ, which is why we still count years that way.
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Preached with such fire that Europe followed him, and wrote 'Jesus, the very thought of Thee.'
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Wrote the most careful theology of the Middle Ages, then saw something of God and called all of it straw.
Wrote Columba's life, and pushed through a law protecting women and children from war.
Charlemagne's teacher, who cleaned up the Bible's Latin text and rebuilt the schools of Europe.