The Apocalyptic Year 1000: Religious Expectations and Social Change, 950-1050 (review)

Nineteenth-century romanticists built a dramatic picture of a population cowering in anticipation of the end of the world as the year 1000 approached, based largely upon a single overheated declamation by the chronicler Radulfus Glaber. Generations of historians thereafter contributed arguments from a variety of methodological viewpoints contending that virtually no sources confirmed Radulfus' claims, that the energetic and creative behavior of the people of the age, particularly in the direction of social and economic progress, belied a fatalistic attitude, and that medieval people were incapable of calculating the date with enough precision to support a mass panic.

As our own millennium approached, the pendulum began to swing backward. In an article of 1989, translated and reprinted as an introduction to the present volume, Johannes Fried urged a new consideration of the problem. He noted that medieval scholars were aware of the difficulty of calculating the dates and devoted various treatises to it, placing the millennial year anywhere between 979 and 1042. He urged a broad investigation of social and intellectual movements within that period that might display hidden anxieties or hopes centering on a sense of impending change. The result is this remarkably coherent, unified volume of essays.

The editors argue that traditional discussions of contemporary responses to the approach of the year 1000 have been distorted by the assumption that they were dominated by fear of the end of the world. In his introduction, Landes argues that millennarianism is inherently political in nature, rousing hopes that inevitably lead to a program of social action and, conversely, provoking a defense of the existing system. Even fear of the last judgment is double-faced in encouraging the powerless to hope for relief from their suffering while instilling the powerful with fear of retribution. This tension of interests in the recorders of their times requires that the honest historian read elusive and hostile sources with sympathy, teasing out the hopes and fears beneath the surface of the account. A wide variety of disciplines have been brought to bear on sources—chronicles, charters, letters, wall paintings, manuscript illuminations, biblical exegesis, poetry, liturgy, cults, and hagiography—in hopes of uncovering evidence of apocalyptic fear or millennial expectations among the people at large or, more commonly, among the literate elite who communicated with them.

Part One consists of five close readings of a series of sources devoted to a consideration of the coming end itself—commentaries on the apocalypse and its attendant signs. Part Two analyzes slightly more indirect materials like wall paintings and poetry concerned with the Last Judgment. Part Three explores the history of the period for evidence of reaction to apocalyptic or millennial expectations. Part IV provides an overview of the astronomical situation of the period and a selection of relevant documents. This wide net effectively gathers an enormous catch of evidence: A sense of cosmic change was widespread among the men who recorded the age. The editors have more than proved their argument that the fears and hopes that circled around the year 1000 are embedded in the literature of spirituality, imperial renewal, ecclesiastical reform, moral corruption, and social progress that made the eleventh century so vibrant an age in European history.