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300BOOK REVIEWS Elizabeth of Hungary, and Josaphat Kuncewycz). As might be expected from a European author who spent much of his priestly life in Brazil, there is also a deep concern with "missionary" saints (for example, in addition to several mentioned above,Ansgar, Rose of Lima, IsaacJogues, and Charles Lwanga). Founders of religious orders are also well represented: complementing Francis, Dominic, and Ignatius are Cajaten, Angela Merici, Antony Zacearía, Camillus of Lellis, and Joseph Calasanz. If any national tradition is surprisingly highlighted, it is the English, with such saints as Bede, Anselm of Canterbury, John Fisher, and Thomas More included alongside Boniface and Thomas Becket. The representation of female saints is disappointingly small, numbering less that thirty entries. Some whole categories, such as the saints of the Merovingian and Carolingian kingdoms, are entirely absent. There is certainly a spiritual and political agenda at work here. This book is obviously a work inspired by the author's deep love of and admiration for his subjects. This is not a reference work for academic use, but rather for pious devotion. Footnotes or other references, other than for the quotations which head each entry, are rare. Bibliography for further reading and reference is completely lacking. The entries themselves seem to be the summation of other reference works rather than the product of work in the primary sources. The publishing house, Città Nouva, obviously intends this work to be a complement to the Bibliotheca Sanctorum (Rome, 1961-1969), which they have also published. It is, however, a popular companion to, not a scholarly summary of that vast and useful encyclopedia. English readers will be much better served by such reliable works as Donald Attwater's Penguin Dictionary of Saints (1965) or David Farmer's Oxford Dictionary ofSaints (revised edition, 1992). Thomas Head Hunter College and the Graduate Center City University ofNew York Longingfor the End: A History ofMillennialism in Western Civilization. By Frederic J. Baumgartner. (New York: St. Martin's Press. 1999. Pp. xi, 286. $26.95.) Frederic Baumgartner has taken on the daunting task of examining millennial ideas from their biblical origins to the present, in fewer than 300 pages. To a considerable degree, he has succeeded in presenting a coherent and informative survey. He makes no claims to original research, relying on a limited but well chosen bibliography of works by other historians. Baumgartner is the author of two monographs on sixteenth-century France, but he says in the preface that the decision to write this book came from a seminar he offered to seniors at his (unnamed) college, presumablyVirginia Tech in Blacksburg. While it is never intrusive, there is throughout the book a Catholic BOOK REVIEWS301 perspective on millennialism. This affords some useful insights, since millennialism has been predominantly a Protestant phenomenon. After presenting a glossary of the rather arcane terminology of millennial believers , he introduces his topic by emphasizing the tendency of those believers to form themselves into cults. It is a useful theme, although throughout the book the author tends to overstate the tendency of millennialists to resort to violence . There follows in the first chapters a clear presentation of the evolution of ideas of the Millennium from the Bible through their several important manifestations in the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages. His presentation would have benefited, however, by utilization of Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium, a book whose theme is virtually identical with Baumgartner's and while questionable in some of its conclusions, is rich in its evocation of the broader historical context. A chapter on "Millennialism in the New World" succeeds in the difficult task of connecting Indian and Spanish notions of the place of America in the great scheme with those of Puritan thinkers like the Mathers and Jonathan Edwards. Less successful are the chapters on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They are rather arbitrarily organized, so that a discussion of the Utopian thinkers of the French Enlightenment leads directly to a survey of their nineteenth century successors,with little effort to show the transforming effect that the French and Industrial revolutions had upon the process. In his preface. Baumgartner recalls as a child visiting the site of Marian apparitions in...

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