Carol Rifelj Lecture Series - Recycling the Apocalypse: Resurrection, Adaption, and Sacred Fragments on Medieval Iceland

Robyn Barrow, History of Art & Architecture   Recycling the Apocalypse: Resurrection, Adaption, and Sacred Fragments on Medieval Iceland On medieval Iceland, which visitors conceptualized as the very mouth of hell, drastic environmental change and resource scarcity was not a sign of apocalypse, but a daily lived experience. The island is subject to extreme weather and geothermal activity that renders any material production, particularly architecture, deeply unstable. As a result, the future of works of art produced on Iceland during the Middle Ages was always entirely uncertain. This lecture will explore the lifetimes of one apocalypse image that itself underwent apocalypse, or total destruction, and yet persisted over time. From the cathedral wall to the roof of a woodshed, the Hólar Last Judgment is a profitable ground to complicate issues of apocalyptic thinking amidst ecological adaption. The scarcity of timber access on Iceland meant that wooden structures and objects were endlessly at risk of being recycled, lending to wood a kind of material mutability unique to this context. Considered alongside the environmental histories of the island, discard studies, and twelfth-century formulations of the resurrected body, the ruins of the Hólar apocalypse opens new pathways for considering culturally contingent nature of both apocalypse and reuse, both in the Middle Ages and today.