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A review by readingthroughthelists
The Apocalypse in the Early Middle Ages by James Palmer
4.0
I read this book for a course on medieval apocalyptic thought; our professor recommended it to us as a useful guide for the semester, a sort of tour-de-apocalypse. This being my first time studying the subject, I found Palmer's book tremendously helpful in assisting to give a fairly clear overview of changes in eschatology from about 300 to 1000 A.D. As becomes clear in the work, this was a time of enormous change in Christian thought, society, kingship, empire, and apocalyptic expectation. The corpus of source material is massive, but Palmer does an admirable job of keeping things straight and, most importantly, tying the significance of the works back to the main theme which is that "apocalypse made sense of things and conceptualised history. It offered a language which could be used to direct situations."
This mentality is an important one to keep as it enables the reader to see things from the perspectives of the people living at the time, to think their thoughts, rather than to believe that everyone who expected the apocalypse was a religious fanatic expecting the sky to cave in at any second or else a puritanical bishop trying to keep everyone in check. As Palmer shows, the idea of the apocalypse was a very complex one evolving over a long period of time in many different places, each of which brought their own situation and concerns to the table. In short, apocalyptic thought isn't just about how people thought the world would end, it's how they engaged with their world in the present, and that in itself makes for a fascinating study.
The book is a dense one, with lots of footnotes and sources listed, and this combined with my obsessive note-taking made for slow going; there were also times when the thread of Palmer's arguments seemed to disappear and I had to fall back on lectures and seminars to understand the "plot" of the period. The book is still worth a read on its own, but if you are taking a course on apocalyptic thought and can elaborate on the events discussed, then enjoy and certainly keep this one by the bedside table.
This mentality is an important one to keep as it enables the reader to see things from the perspectives of the people living at the time, to think their thoughts, rather than to believe that everyone who expected the apocalypse was a religious fanatic expecting the sky to cave in at any second or else a puritanical bishop trying to keep everyone in check. As Palmer shows, the idea of the apocalypse was a very complex one evolving over a long period of time in many different places, each of which brought their own situation and concerns to the table. In short, apocalyptic thought isn't just about how people thought the world would end, it's how they engaged with their world in the present, and that in itself makes for a fascinating study.
The book is a dense one, with lots of footnotes and sources listed, and this combined with my obsessive note-taking made for slow going; there were also times when the thread of Palmer's arguments seemed to disappear and I had to fall back on lectures and seminars to understand the "plot" of the period. The book is still worth a read on its own, but if you are taking a course on apocalyptic thought and can elaborate on the events discussed, then enjoy and certainly keep this one by the bedside table.