Adso of Montier-en-Der

Antichrist seated above Leviathan; with his spear he points to a quote from Adso's De antichristo. Illustration from the Liber Floridus.

Adso of Montier-en-Der (; 910/920 – 992) was abbot of the Benedictine monastery of Montier-en-Der in France, and died on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Biographical information on Adso comes mainly from one single source and has come under question, but the traditional biography depicts him as an abbot who enacted important monastic reform, as a scholar, and as a writer of five hagiographies. His best-known work was a biography of Antichrist, titled "De ortu et tempore Antichristi", which combined exegetical and Sibylline lore. This letter became one of the best-known medieval descriptions of Antichrist, copied many times and of great influence on all later apocalyptic tradition, in part because, rather than as an exegesis of apocalyptic texts, he chose to describe Antichrist in the style of a hagiography.

Biography Biographical knowledge of Adso is limited to the comments made by a chronicler from his abbey, who wrote a half century after him; a successor of his under abbot Bruno finished Adso's final hagiography, on Bercharius, and in the process provided us with biographical detail. Supposedly born into a wealthy, noble family near Saint-Claude in the early 900s, he was educated at Luxeuil Abbey and became scholaster at Saint-Epvre near Toul. Another complicating factor is the Life of Clotilde, a hagiography of Clotilde possibly written for Gerberga of Saxony, the recipient of the letter on Antichrist, whose author is argued by a number of scholar to be identical with the author of the letter.

Goullet proposes a somewhat shortened biography, with Adso born in the 930s--which would mean that he would have written the letter possibly as a teenager. Simon Maclean proposes a radically different solution: in a nutshell, he suggests two Adsos ("Adso" being a very common name at the time)--the one, of Montier-en-Der, the author of the hagiographies; the other, Adso the abbot of St-Basle Abbey at Verzy (c. 970 – c. 991), whose epitaph was written by Adso of Montier-en-Der. Verzy is near Rheims, one of the most important locations in the sphere of influence of Gerberga, and a center of the monastic reform which she was interested in. This Adso, then, could be the author of the letter and of the Life of Clotilde. ), and the famous Epistola Adsonis ad Gerbergam reginam de ortu et tempore antichristi, frequently abbreviated De antichristo, a tract on the life and career of the Antichrist written as a letter to Gerberga of Saxony, the wife of Louis IV d'Outremer. Adso's true innovation (an argument proposed by Robert Konrad in 1964 and continued by Rihard Kenneth Emmerson in 1979) was the form in which he structured the material: he wrote it not in the form of a theological tract or exegetical commentary, which could have been organized by scriptural source, but rather as a hagiography, as a saint's life. The saintly biography is "a form easily understood and readily recognizable by every Christian", and his legend is an anti-legend.

The format did suit the times well, with its love of saintly biography: the biography of Antichrist became a standard entry in many saints' legends, including Jacobus de Voragine's Golden Legend, and it appears very frequently in vernacular legendaries, usually translated from the Libellus quote closely. In later editions of the letter, the prologue and the epilogue (which named Adso and Gerberga) were frequently cut off (which also makes it resemble a saint's life), and thus the letter was easily attributed to others including Rabanus Maurus, Alcuin, Jerome, and St. Augustine. Emmerson states there are most likely at least 76 versions in Latin between the 10th and 15th centuries. It is quoted by Ignaz von Döllinger among other writings of the medieval conception of Antichrist. It is printed in Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaeualis vol 45, edited by D. Verhelst (Turnhout, 1976). The letter and Adso's hagiographies are found in Jacques Paul Migne (Patrologia Latina, CXXXVII, 597-700).