James T Palmer on the Early Middle Ages and Other Things
The climate changes. How does that affect societies? We may be facing unprecedented global warming but the past can still help us to frame and understand the relationship between environmental change and history. There is a growing scholarship on this and has been since Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie started exploring the subject in the 1950s… Continue reading Climates of Crisis!
Last week I spent an enjoyable three days at a mammoth conference in Vienna: “Making Ends Meet: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the End of Times in Medieval Christianity, Islam and Buddhism”. It is not often that you get medievalists in a room comparing Western and Byzantine Christendoms, different Muslim cultures, Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism, and Shintoism… Continue reading Finding New Apocalypses
Last week Cambridge University Press published my new book, The Apocalypse in the Early Middle Ages! This, I thought, would be a good time to reflect on a couple of themes from the book. The idea that people believed that the world would end, and probably soon, is often not taken too seriously. For many… Continue reading Apocalypse, Merovingian and Modern
The Apocalypse in the Early Middle Ages is nearing completion! There is now a sleek, no-nonsense cover featuring Judgement Day from the Bamberg Apocalypse (see below). Final proofs are due next week and the CUP website seems to be suggesting publication in November... which might also be when Bede and the Future sees the light of… Continue reading Apocalypse Cover!
