Abstract

In 1901 George Lincoln Burr published an article in the American Historical Review in which he summarized for American historians a new consensus among their European colleagues: the arrival of the year 1000 had not provoked any apocalyptic expectations. This position completely reversed the previous view championed in the mid-nineteenth century by historians like Jules Michelet, who had drawn a dramatic picture of mass apocalyptic expectations climaxing in the year 1000. Despite extensive advances in scholarship since 1900, medieval historians continue to accept and repeat this revisionist position, a position that is methodologically jejune and that almost completely ignores the social dynamics of millennial beliefs. This paper proposes to reconsider the issue from the perspective of the more sophisticated understanding of the phenomenon made possible by two generations of millennial scholarship