The Pursuit Of The Millennium

Author : Norman Cohn
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0198020023
Total Pages : 419 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Norman Cohn
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0195004566
Total Pages : 419 pages
Book Rating : 4.64/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : A.B. Yehoshua
Publisher : Halban Publishers
ISBN 13 : 190555950X
Total Pages : 351 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Journey to the End of the Millennium written by A.B. Yehoshua and published by Halban Publishers. This book was released on 2012-07-05 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The year is 999 A.D. Christians in Europe are preparing themselves for the arrival of the Messiah at the millennium and religious fervour is in the air. Sailing from the North African port of Tangier to a small, distant town called Paris are a Jewish merchant, Ben Attar, his two beloved wives and his Arab partner, Abu Lutfi. They have come for a meeting with their third partner the widower, Raphael Abulafia who has been forced to turn his back on their previous trading partnership because of his new wife's distrust of the dual marriage of Ben Attar. The latter turns this annual trading voyage into a personal quest to legitimise his second wife, restore his honour and, equally important, to show others the richness and humanity in his way of life. A confrontation ensues between people of different cultures whose ways of living and loving are so different, and yet who are of the same religion, believe in the same God and in the same morality. Thus we enter a profound human drama whose moral conflicts of fidelity and desire resonate deeply with our times. A. B. Yehoshua has imaginatively recreated a medieval world with its merchant trade in great depth and sensuous detail. His evocation of one man's love is lyrical, erotic even, and A Journey to the End of the Millennium will rank with the best of Yehoshua's work.

Author : Norman Cohn
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780300090888
Total Pages : 298 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan
Publisher : Our Sunday Visitor
ISBN 13 : 1612781187
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Priests for the Third Millennium written by Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan and published by Our Sunday Visitor. This book was released on 2009-08-26 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archbishop Dolan clearly sets forth what it takes to be a Catholic priest in the Third Millennium. Whether he is stressing the necessity of regular Confession and the need to celebrate daily Mass and say the Liturgy of the Hours or discussing priestly celibacy in frank, realistic terms, he emphasizes true priest identity by presenting a life worth living, a life worth sharing, a life worth offering up to the Father through Christ and in the Holy Spirit. Pastoral, practical, and thoroughly Catholic, Priests for the Third Millennium will renew the joy of being Catholic in the heart of seminarians, priests, and the people they serve.

Author : Robert Friedel
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 026251401X
Total Pages : 601 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Culture of Improvement written by Robert Friedel and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2010-02-26 with total page 601 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. Why does technology change over time, how does it change, and what difference does it make? In this sweeping, ambitious look at a thousand years of Western experience, Robert Friedel argues that technological change comes largely through the pursuit of improvement—the deep-rooted belief that things could be done in a better way. What Friedel calls the "culture of improvement" is manifested every day in the ways people carry out their tasks in life—from tilling fields and raising children to waging war. Improvements can be ephemeral or lasting, and one person's improvement may not always be viewed as such by others. Friedel stresses the social processes by which we define what improvements are and decide which improvements will last and which will not. These processes, he emphasizes, have created both winners and losers in history. Friedel presents a series of narratives of Western technology that begin in the eleventh century and stretch into the twenty-first. Familiar figures from the history of invention are joined by others—the Italian preacher who described the first eyeglasses, the dairywomen displaced from their control over cheesemaking, and the little-known engineer who first suggested a grand tower to Gustav Eiffel. Friedel traces technology from the plow and the printing press to the internal combustion engine, the transistor, and the space shuttle. Friedel also reminds us that faith in improvement can sometimes have horrific consequences, as improved weaponry makes warfare ever more deadly and the drive for improving human beings can lead to eugenics and even genocide. The most comprehensive attempt to tell the story of Western technology in many years, engagingly written and lavishly illustrated, A Culture of Improvement documents the ways in which the drive for improvement has shaped our modern world.

Author : Jacques Attali
Publisher : Three Rivers Press
ISBN 13 : 9780812920888
Total Pages : 148 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Frances Courtney Kneupper
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190279362
Total Pages : 281 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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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: Even within the sensational genre of eschatological prophecy, the prophecies of the late medieval Empire stand out as strikingly bitter and violent texts. They foresee the savage chastisement of the clergy, the murder of clerics, and the forceful restructuring of the Church. But they also infuse the apocalyptic narrative with explicitly German elements. German speakers are frequently cast as the agents of these stirring events, in which the clergy suffer tribulations and the Church hierarchy is torn down. Thus the central argument of this book is that popular German prophecies encouraged a vision of members of the Empire as the ordained reformers of Christendom at the end of time.

Author : Bernard McGinn
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780231112574
Total Pages : 428 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Visions of the End written by Bernard McGinn and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From millenarists to Antichrist hunters, from the Sibyls to the Hussites, Visions of the End is a monumental compendium spanning the literature of the Christian apocalyptic tradition from the period A.D. 400 to 1500, masterfully selected and complete with a comprehensive introduction and new preface.

Author : William H. McNeill
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022616019X
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.91/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Pursuit of Power written by William H. McNeill and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-11-15 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this magnificent synthesis of military, technological, and social history, William H. McNeill explores a whole millennium of human upheaval and traces the path by which we have arrived at the frightening dilemmas that now confront us. McNeill moves with equal mastery from the crossbow—banned by the Church in 1139 as too lethal for Christians to use against one another—to the nuclear missile, from the sociological consequences of drill in the seventeenth century to the emergence of the military-industrial complex in the twentieth. His central argument is that a commercial transformation of world society in the eleventh century caused military activity to respond increasingly to market forces as well as to the commands of rulers. Only in our own time, suggests McNeill, are command economies replacing the market control of large-scale human effort. The Pursuit of Power does not solve the problems of the present, but its discoveries, hypotheses, and sheer breadth of learning do offer a perspective on our current fears and, as McNeill hopes, "a ground for wiser action."