The Year 1000: Religious and Social Response to the Turning of the First Millennium (review)

Most of these studies illustrate the position Edward Peters terms "the weak thesis of the terrors" (p. 18), which has replaced two earlier positions. Peters' discussion of the historiography begins with the reception of the eleventh-century History of Rodulfus Glaber, which reports prophecies, signs, and religious ferment in conjunction with the millennium. Although after the sixteenth century this text and several like it were widely known, the "strong terrors thesis" developed in the 1830's and '40's thanks to some French and Italian historians whose awareness of the momentous character of contemporary events influenced their reading of medieval sources. Within a few decades, scholars noticed that the evidence for the terrors was flimsy: only a few homilists and chroniclers had shown an interest in the year 1000, and even they recorded nothing like widespread fear. The phrase "adpropinquante mundi termino," which appeared often in charters and chronicles, was commonplace since the sixth century. Challenges like these began to appear in the 1870's and '80's, and by the early twentieth century the "strong counter-thesis" (p. 16) was dominant. Over the next generations, as they gained a more nuanced picture of medieval social, cultural, and religious history than champions of the earlier positions had enjoyed, scholars revisited the question and began to develop the "weak thesis of the terrors." This position considers a wider period than just the years around 1000; views ideas about the millennium as continuous with early medieval apocalypticism; considers regional history; attends to responses to the millennium other than fear; and admits that the silence of the sources may be the result of ecclesiastical prudence or, post-1000, retrospective shame over anxiety people had experienced.

E. A. Matter outlines the history of patristic and early medieval commentaries on the Apocalypse, showing how in the fourth and fifth centuries (p. 29) "apocalyptic fervor" was transformed into "an extended allegory of the church," and that down until the twelfth century the normal approach to this text was "anagogic" and "ecclesiological" (p. 36) rather than chiliastic.

Two studies focus on the homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Wulfstan. M. P. Richards shows how the tone and content of the eschatological sermons changed after the year 1000 from warnings to "an announcement that the time must be here" (p. 46). N. E. Atkinson and D. E. Burton place the imagery of violation in the sermons within the context of on-going strife with the Vikings. According to Wulfstan this physical warfare points to the spiritual struggle against the devil: until reform ends the crimes and moral failures of the laity, Antichrist will ravage the Church, presented alternately as God's house and a female body.

Ademar of Chabannes (d. 1034) also receives two studies. D. F. Callahan uses manuscript evidence to show the apocalyptic character of the Cross Ademar himself saw in a nocturnal vision. Michael Frassetto shows that Ademar had vivid eschatological concerns that focused on the person of the Antichrist who, he thought, had arrived as harbinger of the Last Days.

Matthew Gabriele employs diplomatic evidence to support his contention that, when Emperor Otto III entered the tomb of Charlemagne at Aachen on Pentecost 1000, he had political intentions which were shaped by beliefs about the Last Days.

T. J. Wellman considers the Marian interests of Bishop Fulbert of Chartres (d. 1028). Although his extant writings include no reference to the millennium, Fulbert started to rebuild the cathedral and established Chartres as a pre-eminent Marian cult site, efforts that Wellman argues make most sense in the context of apocalyptic concerns.

The chapter on Thietmar of Merseburg by D. A. Warner is valuable for qualifying C. S. Jaeger's image of the Ottonian courtier bishop, but is thematically out of place in the present collection.

P. G. Jestice ably distinguishes the literal "imitatio Christi" that emerged in tenth- and eleventh-century hagiography from the metaphorical...