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At 04:12 PM 3/26/98 +0100, you wrote: > Dear medievalists: > > Could someone of you provide me with RECENT bibliography references >concerning millenarism? My knowledge on this theme is ridiculous. http://www.mille.org/1000-pg.html >I understand that there are two three >different approaches to this topic: those who >support the idea that people were terrified by the proximity of the Last >Judgment (something I cannot understand: if you are a good christian, why >being scared of going to Paradise?). good if naive formulation: how many people *really* feel they will be saved; i wd hope most people had the honest humility not to assume so. but yes, the approach of an apocalyptic date inspires as much hope as fear, and therefore the year 1000 inspired far more than the "paralytic fear" for which the late 19th cn historians searched for (rather limply) in vain. (hence the third option: not (just) fear, not indifference, but hope and fear.) >On the other hand, some scholars our late 19th cn positivists and a long line of historians who have repeated their argument without thinking about it since >say >that millenarism is nothing but a myth: only a bunch of fools thought that >the year 1000 A.D. meant the end. a nice formulation for what is the key flaw in this kind of historical work. *we* know it didnt happen; they couldn't until after. i think it's hard to imagine a person in western europe at the turn of the millennium, with the events that were going on (political, military, social, natural, epidemiological, astronomic, etc) who did not entertain the notion that this was the end. we have texts to that effect. (http://www.mille.org/1000-dos.htm) now if you want to, you can dismiss all of those who thought it was the end as crackpots, but then you have to explain what otto III thought he was doing opening up charlemagne's tomb on pentecost of 1000. and if you say, "it was pure coincidence", is this an effort to understand otto III? or to project a reassuring image of "rationality" back onto him? > Thank you for your help > > Carlos Sastre what prompted you to ask? rlandes Richard Landes Boston University History Department Center for Millennial Studies http://www.mille.org/ [log in to unmask] 617-353-2558 of 617-353-2556 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%