The Pursuit Of The Millennium

Download or read book The Pursuit of the Millennium written by Norman Cohn and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1970-05-15 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The end of the millennium has always held the world in fear of earthquakes, plague, and the catastrophic destruction of the world. At the dawn of the 21st millennium the world is still experiencing these anxieties, as seen by the onslaught of fantasies of renewal, doomsday predictions, and New Age prophecies. This fascinating book explores the millenarianism that flourished in western Europe between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries. Covering the full range of revolutionary and anarchic sects and movements in medieval Europe, Cohn demonstrates how prophecies of a final struggle between the hosts of Christ and Antichrist melded with the rootless poor's desire to improve their own material conditions, resulting in a flourishing of millenarian fantasies. The only overall study of medieval millenarian movements, The Pursuit of the Millennium offers an excellent interpretation of how, again and again, in situations of anxiety and unrest, traditional beliefs come to serve as vehicles for social aspirations and animosities.

Download or read book Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come written by Norman Cohn and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All over the world people look forward to a perfect future, when the forces of good will be finally victorious over the forces of evil. Once this was a radically new way of imagining the destiny of the world and of mankind. How did it originate, and what kind of world-view preceded it? In this engrossing book, the author of the classic work The Pursuit of the Millennium takes us on a journey of exploration, through the world-views of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India, through the innovations of Iranian and Jewish prophets and sages, to the earliest Christian imaginings of heaven on earth. Until around 1500 B.C., it was generally believed that once the world had been set in order by the gods, it was in essence immutable. However, it was always a troubled world. By means of flood and drought, famine and plague, defeat in war, and death itself, demonic forces threatened and impaired it. Various combat myths told how a divine warrior kept the forces of chaos at bay and enabled the world to survive. Sometime between 1500 and 1200 B.C., the Iranian prophet Zoroaster broke from that static yet anxious world-view, reinterpreting the Iranian version of the combat myth. For Zoroaster, the world was moving, through incessant conflict, toward a conflictless state--"cosmos without chaos." The time would come when, in a prodigious battle, the supreme god would utterly defeat the forces of chaos and their human allies and eliminate them forever, and so bring an absolutely good world into being. Cohn reveals how this vision of the future was taken over by certain Jewish groups, notably the Jesus sect, with incalculable consequences. Deeply informed yet highly readable, this magisterial book illumines a major turning-point in the history of human consciousness. It will be mandatory reading for all who appreciated The Pursuit of the Millennium.

Download or read book A Journey to the End of the Millennium written by Abraham B. Yehoshua and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2000 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the year 999, when Ben Attar, a Moroccan Jewish merchant, takes a second wife, he commits an act whose unforeseen consequences will forever alter his family, his relationships, his business-his life. In an attempt to forestall conflict and advance his business interests at the same time, Ben Attar undertakes his annual journey to Europe with both his first wife and his new wife. The trip is the beginning of a profound human drama whose moral conflicts of fidelity and desire resonate with those of our time. Yehoshua renders the medieval world of Jewish and Christian culture and trade with astonishing depth and sensuous detail. Through the trials of a medieval merchant, the renowned author explores the deepest questions about the nature of morality, character, codes of human conduct, and matters of the heart.

Download or read book The Empire at the End of Time written by Frances Courtney Kneupper and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Empire at the End of Time, Frances Courtney Kneupper introduces popular eschatological prophecies of the late medieval Empire. Demonstrating how these prophecies operated to create a vision of the German community as the ordained reformers of Christendom, Kneupper also examines their connection to contemporary discourses on Church reform and political identity.

Download or read book Millennium written by Jacques Attali and published by Three Rivers Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jacques Attali, French President Mitterand's most trusted advisor and president of the new European bank of Reconstruction and development, offers a provocative and all-too-convincing view of the future in an increasingly troubled world.

Download or read book The Pursuit of the Millennium written by Norman Cohn and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1970 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating book explores the millenarianism that flourished in Western Europe between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries.

Download or read book A Culture of Improvement written by Robert Douglas Friedel and published by MIT Press (MA). This book was released on 2007 with total page 606 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How technological change in the West has been driven by the pursuit of improvement: a history of technology, from plows and printing presses to penicillin, the atomic bomb, and the computer.