The Birth of Purgatory

In The Birth of Purgatory, Jacques Le Goff, the brilliant medievalist and renowned Annales historian, is concerned not with theological discussion but with the growth of an idea, with the relation between belief and society, with mental structures, and with the historical role of the imagination. Le Goff argues that the doctrine of Purgatory did not appear in the Latin theology of the West before the late twelfth century, that the word purgatorium did not exist until then. He shows that the growth of a belief in an intermediate place between Heaven and Hell was closely bound up with profound changes in the social and intellectual reality of the Middle Ages. Throughout, Le Goff makes use of a wealth of archival material, much of which he has translated for the first time, inviting readers to examine evidence from the writings of great, obscure, or anonymous theologians.

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• Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory: Rethinking The Things That Matter Most
• Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life
• The Medieval Imagination
• Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages
• The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336 (Lectures on the History of Religions, No. 15)
• Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages - Updated Edition
• The Age of the Cathedrals: Art and Society, 980-1420
• The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, Revised and Expanded Edition
• Money and the Middle Ages