Abstract
The genesis of the ‘Terrors of the Year 1000’ argument can with some certainty be dated to the 1820s and 1830s when the passions of the July Monarchy shaped the understandings of a generation of scholars. The thesis that there was widespread fear of the Apocalypse was under sustained assault by scholars from France, Germany, and Italy (but not, until later, the United States) as early as the 1870s, though. This essay will examine the historiography of this debate as a product of its time by considering the career of the American historian who led the charge against the cultural Romantics – founding member of the Medieval Academy, president of the American Historical Association, and professor at Cornell, George Lincoln Burr. Burr vs. Michelet was a war about the meaning of the nineteenth century, about modernity, but a war fought by proxy through the sources of the tenth and eleventh centuries.
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Notes
The literature is vast but in some ways the argument has essentially become one about ‘eschatology’ versus ‘apocalypticism.’ ‘Eschatology’ is a concern for the last things, usually meaning the end of time. ‘Apocalypticism’ is a belief that the end of time is imminent. Another term, ‘millenarianism,’ is a belief that the final events will usher in an era (1000 years) of peace and justice here on Earth (see Landes, 1988, 205–6).
Burr seemed to have settled the question (for the time) in the American academy. By the next year, Albert Granger Harkness of Brown University could state that the belief that the world would end in the Year 1000 had been ‘conclusively disproved’ (Harkness, 1902, 125).
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Gabriele, M. The ‘Terrors of the Year 1900’: The eleventh century and a debate about the meaning of modernity. Postmedieval 10, 194–205 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00125-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00125-z