The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, Revised and Expanded Edition

526 Pages·1970·3.11 MB·English

by  Norman Cohn

Table of Contents

Title Page
Copyright Page
Foreword
Introduction
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1 - The Tradition of Apocalyptic Prophecy

Jewish and early Christian apocalyptic
The apocalyptic tradition in medieval Europe

Chapter 2 - The Tradition of Religious Dissent

The ideal of the apostolic life
Some early messiahs

Chapter 3 - The Messianism of the Disoriented Poor

The impact of rapid social change
The poor in the first crusades

Chapter 4 - The Saints Against the Hosts of Antichrist

Saviours in the Last Days
The demonic hosts
Phantasy, anxiety and social myth

Chapter 5 - In the Backwash of the Crusades

The Pseudo-Baldwin and the ‘Master of Hungary’
The last crusades of the poor

Chapter 6 - The Emperor Frederick as Messiah
Joachite prophecy and Frederick II
The resurrection of Frederick
Manifestos for a future Frederick

Chapter 7 - An Elite of Self-immolating Redeemers

The genesis of the flagellant movement
Revolutionary flagellants
The secret flagellants of Thuringia

Chapter 8 - An Elite of Amoral Supermen (i)

The heresy of the Free Spirit
The Amaurians
The sociology of the Free Spirit

Chapter 9 - An Elite of Amoral Supermen (ii)

The spread of the movement
The way to self-deification
The doctrine of mystical anarchism

Chapter 10 - The Egalitarian State of Nature

In the thought of Antiquity
In patristic and medieval thought

Chapter 11 - The Egalitarian Millennium (i)

Marginalia to the English Peasants’ Revolt
The Taborite Apocalypse
Anarcho-communism in Bohemia

Chapter 12 - The Egalitarian Millennium (ii)

The Drummer of Niklashausen
Thomas Müntzer

Chapter 13 - The Egalitarian Millennium (iii)

Anabaptism and social unrest
Münster as the New Jerusalem
The messianic reign of John of Leyden

Conclusion
Appendix: The Free Spirit in Cromwell’s England: the Ranters and their
Literature
Notes and Bibliography
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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Copyright © Norman Cohn 1961, 1970
First edition, 1957
This revised and enlarged edition first issued as an
Oxford University Press paperback, 1970
printing, last digit: 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22
Printed in the United States of America
Foreword

The publication of a third edition of The Pursuit of the Millennium has provided
an opportunity for a thorough revision. Almost a quarter of a century has passed
since I began work on the book, and thirteen years since I finished it. It would be
a poor comment on the progress of scholarship, or on my mental elasticity, or on
both, if I could find nothing in it now to modify or clarify. In point of fact I have
found plenty. The new version has thirteen chapters instead of twelve, and a
different Introduction and Conclusion; two other chapters have been
substantially altered; and innumerable minor changes have been made
throughout. Some readers may like to know what, in general terms, all this
amounts to. The changes, then, can be summarized as follows.
In the first place, the results of recent research have been taken into account.
The Pursuit of the Millennium is still the only book on its subject, i.e. the
tradition of revolutionary millenarianism and mystical anarchism as it developed
in western Europe between the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries. But there
have been many fresh contributions, ranging from short articles to long books,
on individual aspects and episodes of that story. In particular the picture of that
mysterious cult, the Free Spirit, has been filled out by the labours of Professor
Romana Guamieri, of Rome. These labours have included the identification and
editing of The Mirror of Simple Souls of Marguerite Porete - a basic text of the
Free Spirit, which admirably complements the much later Ranter texts that form
the Appendix to the present work. Professor Guarnieri has also produced the
nearest approach that has yet been made to a complete history of the cult, in Italy
as well as in northern and central Europe. Our knowledge of the Taborites,
Pikarti and Adamites of Bohemia has likewise been deepened, not only by the
constant flow of Marxist studies emanating from Czechoslovakia but also by an
impressive and enlightening series of articles by an American scholar, Professor
Howard Kaminsky. These major additions to knowledge, along with many minor
ones, have been incorporated into the relevant chapters of this book.
As The Pursuit of the Millennium never was intended to be a general history
of religious dissent or ‘heresy’ in the Middle Ages, most of the recent research in
that field — which is abundant — leaves its argument untouched. Nevertheless it
is a thought-provoking experience to read such wide-ranging and authoritative
works as Dissent and Reform in the Early Middle Ages by Professor Jeffrey
Russell; Heresy in the Later Middle Ages by Professor Gordon Leff; and The
Radical Reformation by Professor George Williams. None of these works
overlaps with The Pursuit of the Millennium in more than a couple of chapters,
but between them they offer a grandiose history of dissent extending from the
eighth century to the sixteenth. Viewed in this wider context, the sects and
movements described in the present volume emerge all the more clearly as
exceptional and extreme: in the history of religious dissent, they form the most
absolute, anarchic wing. The new Introduction defines their peculiarities, while
the new Chapter 2 shows how they fit into the larger picture.
The social composition of these sects and movements, and the social setting in
which they operated, were adequately indicated in the first edition; and it proved
unnecessary to make any changes on that score. It may be that economic
historians could, by detailed research into individual cases, bring further
enlightenment; but certainly none is to be expected from the current exchange of
dogmatic generalizations between Marxist and non-Marxist historians of
‘heresy’. Nothing, for instance, could be more sterile than the debate between
certain historians in West and East Germany as to whether ‘heresy’ can or
cannot be interpreted as a protest of the unprivileged; the former being,
apparently, unable to imagine how a religious movement can express social
animosities, and the latter how dissent can come from the privileged strata. The
best protection against such oversimplification is some acquaintance with the
sociology of religion. So fortified, one is unlikely to imagine that all medieval
‘heresy’ was of one kind, reflecting the same kind of discontent and appealing to
the same segments of society.
So far as revolutionary millenarianism is concerned, its sociological import
emerges from chapter after chapter of this book; but I have also tried to
summarize it, as concisely as possible, in the Conclusion. The Conclusion is
indeed the part of the book that has attracted most attention of all; in particular,
much comment, both favourable and unfavourable, has been provoked by the
suggestion that the story told in this book may have some relevance to the
revolutionary upheavals of our own century. This argument has been discussed
at length not only in reviews and articles but also, and most profitably, in
spontaneous debates at the universities, British, Continental, and American,
where I have been invited to lecture. All this has helped me to clarify my ideas
on the matter; and while I am still convinced that the argument is valid, I think
that it needed to be expressed both more briefly and more clearly. I have
attempted this in the new Conclusion.