What happens when we die? Can the dead "see" what's happening on earth? What will we be like in our resurrected bodies? Do the souls in paradise know about the souls in hell? What about purgatory? These and other questions about the afterlife have fascinated Christians since the earliest times. Julian (624-690), Bishop of Toledo in Spain, was the first theologian to compile a systematic treatise on Christian eschatology. He did not advance his own theories but instead drew on and synthesized the wisdom of the Church Fathers before him and thereby made their thought available to a wide readership; before long, copies of Julian's Prognosticum had made their way into libraries all over Europe.

Seventh-century Spain, in which the traditional Hispanic-Roman and the new Visigothic cultures both blended and competed, was a fascinating era in the church. Translator and editor Tommaso Stancati provides, in addition to his translation of the Prognosticum, a magisterial four-chapter introduction to Julian's life and times along with extensive and detailed notes.