Mestre Vicent ho diu per espantar. El més enllà medieval

2010. Pròleg de Francisco M. Gimeno Blay, 376 pp.

‘Sir Vicent says it to Scare’ is a sentence that Saint Vincent Ferrer attributed to a supposed sceptical listener when he predicated about the eternal punishments. This perfectly expresses the apocalyptic and terrorist tone of his sermons: the day of divine wrath and Hell are ‘machines to scare’, used repeatedly. Not only by Saint Vincent: the whole medieval literature, theology and iconography are full of this pedagogic use. This book is an innovative study of history and anthropology about the construction of the imaginary of the supernatural world in medieval times, beyond death: heaven, the different compartments of Hell and its inhabitants – angels and saints, souls of the purgatory and limbo, demons and condemned. All of this shapes a system – spaces, dynamics and agents – in continual interaction with the world of the living. Medieval thinking, in a characteristic neo-platonic inversion, gives this ideological construction the category of reality, while the real world is despised and conceived as an irrelevant and ephemeral mirage.