International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Peter Toth
British Library, London, United Kingdom; 
[e-mail]
Visions of the Afterlife between East and West: 
An Unknown Latin Translation of the Greek 
Apocalypse of the Virgin Mary
The most important Christian ”guides” to the netherworld before Dante’s Divina Commedia 
were furnished by various types of visions attributed to biblical authorities as the Apostle Paul or 
saints and holy men as Macarius of Egypt, St. Patrick of Ireland or the Byzantine Basil the Younger. 
Of all these descriptions of hell and afterlife, it was the so-called Apocalypse or Vision of Paul that 
was regarded as the earliest and probably the most popular and authoritative one. 
This early-third-century apocryphal vision, however, despite its wide popularity in East and 
West, has started to be more and more suspicious in the eyes of Byzantine theologians from the 
ninth century onwards. In order to save its basic message, the Apostle’s supernatural travel to the 
netherworld has been „translated” and „upgraded” into a theologically more tolerable travelogue: 
the Apocalypse of the Virgin Mary. Now it is the Virgin who, just like Paul in his Apocalypse, 

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is guided by the Archangel Michael through the netherworld and is introduced to the different 
torments of the damned there. At the end of her visit, deeply moved by the tortures of the suffering 
Christian sinners, she supplicates Christ to suspend their punishment, which is granted and during 
the fifty-day period between the Resurrection and the Pentecost they have a short pause to feel the 
joy of Christ’s resurrection.
This characteristically Byzantine description of the netherworld and the Virgin’s intercessory 
power on behalf of the souls has become one of the most popular texts of the Byzantine Middle 
Ages. Preserved in dozens of manuscripts in Greek, Slavonic, and Romanian, the Apocalypse of 
the Virgin Mary is usually considered to be completely unknown in the Western tradition. In four 
thirteenth-fourteenth-century manuscripts, however, I managed to find a complete, but hitherto 
unrecorded Latin translation of the travelogue of the Virgin’s descent to the hell. The present paper 
will is a detailed examination of the Latin text of the Virgin’s Apocalypse. After outlining the basic 
features of the manuscript-tradition I will survey and analyse the different characteristics of the 
language and style of the Latin text. On the basis of a detailed comparison of the Latin text to the 
Greek and Slavonic versions of the apocryphon I argue that the Latin translation, which is obviously 
a medieval version presumably from the thirteenth century, was made not from a Greek, but – in a 
rather unique way – from a Slavonic original. Beside a historical and philological evaluation of the 
Latin translation and its origin I will also make an attempt to explore the traces of the Latin version 
of this medieval Greek apocryphon in European literature and art.

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