Summary

The annual meeting of the New England Medieval Conference took place at Boston University on December 4 and 5 under the aegis of the Institute for Medieval History. The theme of the meeting - "Prophets and Prophecy" - was certainly in line with current interest in the millennium, and the papers taken as a whole presented a remarkable coherent view of this aspect of medieval thought.

The subject of the first session was "History as Prophecy." Jay Rubenstein (University of New Mexico) spoke on disillusionment following the First Crusade by examining the psychological dilemma of feudal lords returning from this ostensibly transformative experience (part of whose original rationale was to redirect feudal violence towards a spiritual objective). Some of the returnees displayed a character altered for the better, while others returned even more disposed to violence. Nina Safran (Penn State) spoke of the Arab historian, Ibn Habib of Cordoba, who associated religious and social turmoil in ninth-century Islamic Spain with apocalyptic predictions of the end of Muslim rule there. Clifford Backman presented two competing claims to the scholarly and prophetic mantle of Roger Bacon advanced by Arnau de Vilanova and Peter John Olivi. History for these figures was a way of viewing the unwinding of prophecy, as interpreted by a distinctive succession of scholar-prophets.

The second theme was "Astrological Visions." Thomas Glick discussed the "Letter of Toledo," a much-traveled astrology-based prediction of the conversion of Muslims in the light of the distinctive Arab astronomical synthesis as it was received in the Latin West. Laura Smoller (University of Arkansas) spoke on Pierre d'Ailly's late "conversion" from hostility towards astrology to its defense, with an eye towards healing the great schism of Christendom. Ralph Drayton (University of Wisconsin) examined the religious side of medieval medicine, a necessary corollary to the clerical status of most medieval Christian physicians. Religious considerations accounted for physicians' ambivalent posture regarding the use of astrology, talismans, and other arts associated with magic.

The third panel, on "Prophets," opened with Mark Abate's presentation on Roger Bacon's "apocalyptic science." Bacon held both philosophy and science to have been perfectly revealed, only to have been lost with the fall of Adam. In order to defeat Antichrist, Adamic science had to be reconstructed. Franco Mormando (Boston College) followed with an account of Bernardo of Siena's inflammatory popular sermons directed against three minority scapegoats: witches, sodomites, and Jews. Richard Landes began his discussion of two medieval female prophets with a useful distinction between the millennial perspective, which posits a radical transformation of society at some point in the future, and apocalypticism, as an imminent, disruptive transformation.

The final session, "Mass Religious Movements," presented an interesting counterpoint between "The Peace of God," (Fred Paxton, Connecticut College) and "The Religious Context of Peasant Insurrections" (Paul Freedman, Yale), the question in each case being whether these social phenomena fit the description of the session's ostensible subject. Paxton concluded that the Peace of God was a religious movement, but that it was not inspired or led by common people, who were involved or discouraged from participation depending on the objectives of specific leaders. Freedman, while recognizing that peasants phrased grievances in religious terms and apocalypticism added urgency to their demands, argued that the inevitability of peasant revolts stemmed from the nature of lordship itself.

The meeting was made possible by a generous grant from the Boston University Humanities Foundation.

Thomas F. Glick
Director, Medieval Institite