ABSTRACT
Sometime in the late 1030s, Rodulfus Glaber (d. c. 1047), a moderately educated but highly perceptive Benedictine monk, completed book three of his wide-ranging Five Books of Histories. Looking back to the millennium of Christ’s Incarnation, he recorded the events that had befallen mankind around that time, including such troubling portents as the death of great men, a comet and the destruction of Mont-Saint-Michel monastery by fire. However, in the third year of the new millennium he had witnessed the world clothing itself everywhere in a ‘white mantle of churches’. ‘It was’, he added, ‘as if the whole world was shaking itself free, shrugging off the burden of the past’.2
