The Feast of Saint Abraham: Medieval Millenarians and the Jews (review)

220 Reviews blending of what is local and earthy with what is supernatural and beyond time; crude satire on courtly affectations mingled with the high seriousness of worship; doubt with belief. With such dramatic quality and sophistication, with the professionalism ofactors, singers and stage presentation, the involvement of an audience probably more theologically sophisticated than a modern congregation, it is no wonder that one priest asserted that pageants provided 'more suerte & suffycyent auctoryte' than his preaching. A postscript: on Christmas Eve 2000, immediately after this review was drafted, I saw an Anglican nativity play performed near the old pilgrimage site of Our Lady of Caversham. The performers were children, their acting simple, their lines fewer and less sophisticated, but there was no mistaking the resemblance to the Coventry pageants. Barry Collett Department ofHistory University of Melbourne Lerner, Robert E., The Feast of Saint Abraham: Medieval Millenarians and the Jews (The Middle Ages Series), Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001; cloth; pp. 186; R.R.P. £24.50, US$35.00; ISBN 0812235673. The Feast of Saint Abraham opens by stating that while R. I. Moore's argumen that twelfth-century Europe witnessed the birth ofa 'persecuting society' is essentially correct, 'perhaps we will understand the phenomenon better if we recognize that there were alternatives and paths not taken' (p. 1). The alternative delineated here concerns medieval millenarianism, the belief that the prophecy of Christ's 1000year reign of peace between the Second Coming and the Last Judgment (Rev. 20) refers to an earthly, literal time rather than the reign ofthe Church in the present, as Augustine had posited (p. 17). Pace Norman Cohn's insistence that millenarianism necessarily entailed anti-Semitism (p. 3), Lerner argues that Joachim of Fiore's view ofa millennium brought about by the peaceful conversion ofthe Jews exerted a powerful influence on subsequent thinkers. These eight chapters—two on Joachim, and six on his disciples (and theirs in rum) — thus seek to trace what might loosely be called a 'philo-Judaism', though Lerner admits that 'the more accurate phraseology for the stance of [his] subjects would be a "relatively more benign attitude toward the Jews than the late medieval Christian norm'" (p. 120). Reviews 221 Lerner brings together much new information and showcases a great skill at historical recuperation, especially in the face of often-mangled manuscript evidence. In this regard, the materials on both John of Brassigny's fourteenthcentury prophecies and on Frederick ofBrunswith's heresies, both of which are now intelligible thanks to Lerner's own discoveries, are especially compelling. I t is a pleasure to encounter such fascinating new material, presented in an engaging style, and placed carefully in its larger historical trajectory. The volume's brevity (121 pages ofmain text) ensures that these chapters cohere well, but i t also leaves plenty of room for a broader consideration of the topic. For instance, I would have welcomed treatment ofLangland's Piers Plowman, which, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton has suggested (Reformist Apocalypticism and Piers Plowman [Cambridge, 1990]), contains strong traces of Joachism in both its millenarianism and more-benign-than-usual approach to the Jews. But Piers Plowman might have tested Lerner's methodology a bit too sharply. While he suggests that what drove m e n and w o m e n to become (philoJudaic ) Joachites was 'the reading (or the listening to the reading) of books' (p. 120) — an activity that certainly could include the Middle English poet — this claim, put forth in the conclusion, took m e very much by surprise. For a strong current of The Feast of Saint Abraham suggests that real-life relations with historical Jews subtended the millenarianism of many of these authors. Lerner responds with cautious affirmation to the question, 'Could it have been that Joachim had a positive view of the role of the Jews in the divine plan because he himself was b o m Jewish?' (p. 24). This question, and the five-page analysis i t spawns, give the lie to Lerner's concluding judgment that 'it would be unwarranted psychologizing to suppose that philo-Judaism lurked from a sense ofheritage or childhood memories' (p. 29). So, too, do the subsequent discussions ofthese...