thank you, gary. as i'd put it to my mom, "i cdn't have written a better
letter in my support."
richard
At 05:15 PM 7/20/99 +0000, you wrote:
>Richard,
>
>Why shouldn't the NYT print your fair-minded, polite and reasoned
>counter-attack?
>
>The year 1000--really, the year 2000--is a god-send to medievalists. For a
>problem which some would have said is arcane, esoteric, mystifying, too
obscure
>to capture the public interest, we now have a real, live controversy about
>which the NYT will undoubtedly duly editorialize on 31 Dec 99: NO NEED TO
>FEAR...
>
>The "myth-of-the-terrors" people used to say: they panicked because they
were
>stupid brutes living in the benighted Middle Ages. Now the soi-disant
>myth-busters say (in effect): they didn't bother, because they didn't even
know
>what day it was. The position remains curiously the same.
>
>What has changed, I think, is a more scrupulous reading of the evidence,
on the
>part of positivists and anti-positivists alike. Richard, you have handled
the
>evidence in an extremely plausible fashion, pressing your case--and having a
>case to press.
>
>I like and respect Bernard McGinn personally and professionally. He is a
great
>scholar. But there is in his work a reluctance to move outside the world of
>texts. This can be seen both in his studies of apocalypticism (e.g.
*Visions of
>the End*, *Apocalyptic Spirituality*, and his brilliant essays published
by the
>International Centre of Joachite Studies in Fiore) and in his magisterial,
>multi-volumed history of Christian mysticism.
>
>Apocalypticism and mysticism have a pre-textual, post-textual or nontextual
>dimension--collective religious experience for the former ('millenerian
>movements'), individual religious experience for the latter.
>
>Sometimes historians must dare to discuss things which the texts do not
address
>directly or at all, because one may infer that such things did occur, and so
>must be reckoned with.
>
>Gary Dickson
>University of Edinburgh
>
>
>
Richard Landes
Department of History Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University
Boston University Boston University
226 Bay State Road 704 Commonwealth Ave. Suite 205
Boston MA 02215 Boston MA 02215
617-353-2558 (of) 617-358-0226 (tel)
617-353-2781 (fax) 617-358-0225 (fax)
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