Dr. Richard Emmerson’s New Book on the Berry Apocalypse

Dr. Richard Emmerson, visiting scholar in Art History, published his eighth book in 2020, a commentary on the Berry Apocalypse. This illustrated manuscript was created circa 1415 for Jean, Duc de Berry, and is now held at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.  The facsimile and Emmerson’s commentary (available in English and German) were published late last year by Müller & Schindler, and are described in more detail here on the publisher’s site.

Dr. Emmerson is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy and a renowned scholar of medieval apocalypticism and its representation in art, drama, and visionary poetry. He served as chair of Art History at Florida State University from 2006 to 2009, and thereafter as Dean of Liberal Arts at Manhattan College. After retirement, Emmerson returned to Tallahassee as a visiting professor in Art History at FSU, where he teaches graduate seminars on medieval manuscripts and the online undergraduate course The End of the World in Art. The undergraduate course deals with apocalypticism and fundamentalism in historical and modern art media. Both courses prove Emmerson’s abiding interest in the ways people view the end of the world through a fundamentally religious lens.