A Late Antique Harrowing of Hell and Its Medieval Reception

In 1904, Edward Kennard Rand published a Latin sermon by an unknown author from a single manuscript of the ninth century that recounts the amazement of the devil at the crucifixion of Jesus and the devil's defeat at the coming of Christ into the underworld, or the Harrowing of Hell. This Sermo de Confusione Diaboli added a new dimension to the already complex research dossiers of the pseudo-Eusebius of Alexandria sermons and of the Gospel of Nicodemus. A century later, new witnesses of the text edited by Rand and an unedited Latin translation of pseudo-Eusebius' Sermo 17 have begun to shed new light on the interconnectedness of all these materials. The present book critically edits the newly identified Latin documents and discusses them in relation to their Greek sourcer(s) and to one another. It retraces the paths from the protean forms of pseudo-Eusebius' Greek sermons 15 and 17 to their Latin translations, to the Sermo de Confusione Diaboli, and to the Gospel of Nicodemus. In the process, it highlights the creativity of the copyists and translators of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and demonstrates their profound interest and investment in the story of Christ's Descent into Hell.