Richard Landes. Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience.
Andrew Colin Gow
This is an immense and wide-ranging book (a “craggy edifice,” as Garry Trompf rightly notes in his blurb for the back cover); all attempts to review it must fail view of its breadth, diversity, ambition. Richard Landes's first “law apocalyptic dynamics” “Wrong does not mean inconsequential”; second “One person's messiah another's antichrist.” The “law” fact a universal law, but powerful historiographic program revision: just because chroniclers historians since antiquity have correctly noted that hopes and/or fears always been dashed such were unimportant, transitory, superficial or merely crazed, most assumed continue claim. career scholar millennialism began with reassessment Truce God Peace movements late tenth early eleventh centuries Carolingian Capetian France, around year 1000 (during which feudal warlords tamed France was “blanketed by white mantle churches”). He has persistently argued these episodes mass millennial enthusiasm, core elided denied clerical observers after (or, catchy phrase, their collapse: ex post defectu), then radically downplayed subsequent historiography. Such activity Landes considers be work “owls” commenting disapprovingly on disproven nonsense so recently crowed “roosters” enjoining settle down sleep some more, still night, yet heralded new dawn. employs bestiary types based Talmudic story about rooster bat waiting dawn, wondering what bat. attempt set up “ideal [animal] types” representing both prophets (anti-apocalyptic, Augustinian) scholars reminiscent Jean de La Fontaine's Fables; also novel move places prophetic doomsayers scholarly naysayers same notional category, seems like tacit premise claims objectivity (or at least stand outside fray) are hollow. They often are, this leveling pre-selects data possible approaches it.
The American Historical Review