ABSTRACT
Historians of apocalyptic thought at work have had the advantage, or the mental stumbling block, of being able to visualise John’s Apocalypse all too literally. The process of apocalyptical reform was a drama, a play whose successful conclusion demanded the active involvement of clerics, theologians, knights, vintners, merchants and peasants. Reformist apocalypticism could be, in the words of James T. Palmer, nothing more than ‘the reasoned and optimistic stuff of institutional leader’s successfully instigating change in the world’. The preference of modern historians of apocalyptic thought – to focus on millenarianism and on chronological prediction more generally – has led them to create a dichotomy between Augustinianism and the Apocalypse. Medieval historians in search of evidence for apocalyptic moments are left only with the tips of literary icebergs, hiding a massive and irretrievable oral, millennial discourse.
