  Letters Archive
The Earlier Millennium
This year's Fellows' seminar at the Humanities Center
is concerned with apocalyptic notions and the sense
of time, its endings and beginnings, a topic prompted
by the impending arrival of 2000 A.D. In the media,
the millennial event seems to have prompted only two
kinds of stories: an obsession with what to call the
first decade of the new century (the "O's, 'l "zeros,"
"noughts") and the matter of accuracy (the year 2001
is the beginning of the new era, not the turn from
1999 to 2000). Led by Professors Margaret Doody and
David Wood, the Fellows have examined issues
concerning the rise of apocalyptic fervor surrounding
the turn of the century and of the millennium,
especially with respect to contemporary culture.
There is, of course, a precedent of sorts within the
European system of dating by reference to the year
of Christ's birth: the celebrations that attended the
year 1000. One would have to wonder if on the eve of
the millennium the Europeans, far from hoisting
glasses of not yet invented Champagne, were terrified
by an expectation of the end of the world. Historians
have changed their minds about whether or not there
was an apocalyptic climate at the time and the degree
to which it was connected to the millennial calendar.
Ademar of Chabannes, a monk of Angouleme, and Raoul
Glaber, a Burgundian monk, in sermons and historical
narratives, describe disasters and terror that
inspired the population of southern France. The
venerable Carolingian dynasty had been replaced in
France by upstarts, culminating with the betrayal of
the last Carolingian claimant by erstwhile allies in
991, a deed that reminded contemporaries of Judas.
Halley's comet blazed through the sky in the summer
of 989; in 992 the date of the Annunciation coincided
with Good Friday; as 1000 approached, waves of the
frenzy known as St. Anthony's Fire brought on by
ergot poisoning (from spoiled grain) brought on mass
hallucinations that seemed to fulfill the prophecy of
Revelations 9:5. The beginnings of the Peace of God
movement to disarm the knights who were the source of
so much disorder and misery was started in this era,
arising out of a combination of apocalyptic fear and
hope brought on by warnings followed by penance and
miracles, so ably described in recent works by
Richard Landes of Boston University.
And yet most medievalists would tend to dismiss
accounts of the supposed fear of the turn of the
first millennium. The monastic chroniclers on whom
this impression was based wrote at some distance and
invented a considerable amount of their stories to
publicize and make more vivid the miracles associated
with the particular saints' cults of their
monasteries. Additionally, the presence of
apocalyptic expectation does not mean it was centered
on the year 1000. The second coming of Christ has always
been a central problem in Christianity, and the
last book of the New Testament encourages a hunt for
portents that has a similar appeal among many
Christians today as it had a thousand years ago.
Perhaps the greatest flaw in positing widespread fear
of the year 1000 is the lack of uniformity and even
indifference over measurements of time. The custom of
dating from the Incarnation, started in sixth-century
North Africa and Italy, was adopted by Bede in
England and spread to most of Europe by the ninth
century. Other systems of reckoning the year were
not, however, displaced. Some used the regnal year of
a king (thus "in the fifth year of the reign of King
Louis") or calculated on the basis of the indiction,
a fifteen-year cycle usually beginning with the
equivalent of 312 A.D., the year of Constantine's
conversion. In Spain, calculations were based on the
"era" which began with 38 B.C. ("era millesima octava"
would equal 970 A.D.). Furthermore, there was very
little unanimity about when a new year was supposed
to begin. Some calculated from January 1, but the
Annunciation (March 25) was far more common and
Christmas, Easter, or several days in September were
frequently used according to local custom. Finally,
in a period that, to put it mildly, was less driven
by time calculation than ours, events were thought of
in connection with each other (the year of the spring
famine, the eclipse) rather than arrayed on an
abstract grid of numbers.
Monasteries were certainly quite adept at time
calculations both from an Augustinian sense of the
passage of sacred history and the practical need to
figure out the complex problem of when Easter would
occur, which is quite a feat if one cannot simply
rely on someone else's calendar. There were unusually
intense social and religious movements centered
around the year 1000 and in a curious way, medieval
historians have replicated, or created themselves, a
numerological mysticism around this event. The
standard accounts of the final decay of the ancient
world and the beginnings of feudal society give 1000
as the conventional date, as a shorthand (in French
historiography, the whole series of changes that are
thought to mark the be ginning of the Middle Ages
properly speaking is expressed as "la mutation de
l'an mil" the change of the year 1000). This
convenient coincidence is now being undermined by new
interpretations of evidence and different approaches
to the utility of such abstractions as "feudal
society." At the same time, there is some greater
degree of credence given to accounts of apocalyptic
movements of the late tenth and early eleventh
centuries that might not have had the turn of the
millennium as their exclusive motivation, but at
least saw the thousandth anniversary of the In
carnation as significant. For more information, contact the Center's executive director, Mona C. Frederick. [ RPW Center for the Humanities | About the Center | Visiting Fellowship Information | Howard Lecture Series | Seminars and Programs | Programs since 1987 ] [ Vanderbilt University | Site Index | Search Vanderbilt | Help ]
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