Thinking into the Future

Abstract

On one side of the horizon which medieval common people looked out on from their ‘island of time’¹ was the line at which history blends into myth; on the other was the line at which hope or fear hardens into prophecy. The reality of a visionary future to the medieval mind is perhaps most clearly evident in the enormous influence exercised by the strain of apocalyptic thought that runs through the Middle Ages. The most famous prophecy, founded on Augustine’s opinion that the millennium was the first thousand years of the Christian era, was that the world would end in the year 1000. But there is hardly a time throughout the medieval period when one apocalyptic date or another was not being enthusiastically advanced. As the story of medieval millennialism has been so well chronicled elsewhere there is no need to retrace the full story here.² All that need be noted is the near universality with which medieval people accepted the notion that the date of the Apocalypse could be predicted. In our own time those who claim to know when the world will end are assumed by most of us to be of less than sound mind. But in the Middle Ages millennialism was always a part of the intellectual mainstream.³ As Keith Thomas has detailed, a strain of millennarian thought lingered on through most of the seventeenth century. But by the end of that century ‘even the Quakers had come to regard prophecy as distinctly odd’,⁴ and by the eighteenth century ‘the majority of educated men concurred in dismissing [the claims of would-be prophets] a priori as inherently ridiculous’.⁵