Within the last decade noteworthy efforts have been made to provide for a better understanding of Joachim of Fiore through new editions of his work and the establishment of a more exact chronology for the events in his life. Under the direction of Kurt-Victor Selge a Herausgeberkommission der kritischen Gesamtausgabe der Werke Joachims von Fiore has been established, a symposium on the manuscript traditions of Joachim’s work has been held under its auspices, and new critical editions are expected to be forthcoming soon. Professor Selge has contributed significantly to these efforts with his study of the chronology of Joachim’s writings and his edition of the Praephatio sive Prologus super Apocalypsim. I am building on this work and, of course, the outstanding work of such scholars as Marjorie Reeves, and hope now to identify a distinctive stage in Joachim of Fiore’s career.

As has been remarked often enough, Lollardy was the first real English heresy, and its progenitor, John Wyclif, inspired what Anne Hudson has so rightly termed a ‘premature Reformation’, a reformation which had far more immediate impact in Hussite Bohemia, but in England left Wyclif for a century and a half as a voice crying in the wilderness, a prophet without honour in his own country. Since history is usually studied backwards, his name is most commonly associated with the alleged eucharistic heresy condemned at the Blackfriars Council of May 1382. This was more significant for its timing than its substance. The actual charges were not only a distortion of Wyclif’s theory, and Wyclif himself was never specifically named, but any reasonably intelligent scholastic could have worked it out from Wyclif’s philosophical principles at least ten years earlier. But the eucharist had the great advantage of being a theological matter, which no one could contest the right of bishops and masters to deal with, and this made it a far more effective stick with which the papalists could belabour their lay opponents—and by 1382 the times were far more propitious. The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, an event with which Wyclif’s name was quickly linked, had thrown the regency government of the young Richard II into turmoil: and Lollardy, newly introduced as a term of abuse, could be represented as a recipe for any number of horrors, not least the assassination of bishops. The murder of Archbishop Sudbury in 1381 had opened up the way for his replacement by Wyclif’s leading opponent, the very vigorous bishop of London, William Courtenay. All this was however simply the culmination of a long process against Wyclif which had resulted in two abortive heresy trials in 1377 and 1378. In both cases Wyclif was rescued by royal intervention, by John of Gaunt. Wyclif, as he had proudly proclaimed, was a dericus regis, a king’s clerk, a member of the royal household: and as Christopher Given-Wilson has recently shown, king’s clerks might be few in number (and exceptionally cheap to maintain, since they could—as Wyclif was—be paid out of normal pluralism), but they wielded a degree of influence out of all proportion to their numbers.

Thomas Müntzer’s name is inseparably interwoven with the early history of the German Reformation. This reformer was active during the third decade of the sixteenth century and this mainly in Thüringen, an area in the eastern part of the German Empire belonging to the electorate of Saxony. As such it was to come early under the influence of the Lutheran reform movement initiated in Wittenberg.

Apocalyptic ideas lay at the very heart of British Protestant thought throughout the early modern period. They were held by thinkers from all sections of the theological spectrum within Britain, and formed part of the mainstream of the different reformed traditions found within the Tudor state and the kingdom of Scotland. Most British Protestants viewed their daily lives and the world in which they lived through the lens of apocalyptic thought. Its key themes helped create the new Protestant consciousness which emerged in the early modern period throughout the whole of the English-speaking world.

The link between chiliastic prophecy and revolt in the Habsburg monarchy during the seventeenth century was obvious to the government of those times but has been neglected by the rational mind of modern scholars. Most of the cases, ranging in time from the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War to the eighties, and in place from the Austrian heartlands to remote corners of Moravia and Hungary, have been studied in isolation. Many cases have, undoubtedly, escaped the eye of the historian altogether.

In the seventeenth century the Church in Scotland was for the most part engaged in working out an ecclesiastical polity acceptable to itself and to the civil authorities. Hence matters of Church government and of Church/state relations occupied much of the attention of leading theologians such as Samuel Rutherford (1600–61) and George Gillespie (1613–49). Yet there were others who, while deeply involved in the conflicts within the life of the Church, also devoted their attention to the study of the Scriptures and to contemporary theological debates. Prominent among them, on the Episcopal side, was John Forbes (1593–1648) of Corse, the leading member of that group of distinguished scholars know as the ‘Aberdeen Doctors’. Forbes was internationally celebrated for his Institutiones Historico-Theologicae de Doctrina Christiana, published in Holland in 1645. On the Presbyterian side, James Durham (1622–58) was at the same time beginning to make a name for himself as an outstanding exponent of the Scottish Calvinist ethic and would undoubtedly have gone on to enhance a rapidly growing reputation had not his life been cut short by death at the early age of 36. Of his works which were subsequently published his extensive commentary on the Book of Revelation isjustly one of the most important. Between 1658 and 1799 it went through no fewer than seven editions, one of which was printed in Amsterdam in 1660.

An interest in prophecy is a continuing theme of the writings of the Cambridge Platonist, Henry More (1614–87). In his earlier writings, the focus is on prophecy in general, particularly in relation to religious enthusiasm. He did not turn his attention to millenarianism until relatively late in his career, after he had established himself as a philosopher. From 1660 onwards, his writings are characterized by a deepening interest in biblical prophecy generally and in the Book of Revelation in particular. More first discusses biblical prophecy in print in his An Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness (1660). His first systematic treatment of the topic appears in his Synopsis Propheticon which was appended to his Mystery of Iniquity (1664). Aspects of this discussion are elaborated in the fourth and fifth dialogues of his Divine Dialogues (1668), and in his An Exposition of the Seven Epistles to the Seven Churches (1669). He continued to defend his position in other works to the end of his life. As a millenarian, Henry More belongs within the general Protestant tradition which identifies Antichrist as the Pope, the Apocalypse being an ‘aenigmaticall, prefiguration and prediction of the Apostasy thereof [the church] into Antichristianism by the misguidance of the Church-men’. Furthermore, as Jan van den Berg has shown, Henry More was a disciple of the great English millenarian, Joseph Mede. He followed Mede’s synchronic reading of events described in the Apocalypse, that is he interpreted them not as one linear sequence but as a series of concurrent events. In large part More accepted Mede’s collation of the seals, trumpets, and vials with other events described. None the less, More did not agree with Mede on all points. Although the points on which he differed were small, he defended his view with tenacity, as can be seen from his discussion of prophecy with his life-long correspondent and erstwhile pupil, Lady Anne Conway (1630?–79).

What did the eschaton of the Dutch Roman Catholics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries look like? That is the question I will attempt to answer in this article. Before doing so, I should like to note that it is essential to know the expectations, eschatological and otherwise, of a group to get to know its mentality. It is difficult, however, to gauge the nature of expectations and the way in which they operate and it is impossible to arrive at exact ‘measurements’. This article will therefore above all be concerned with the way in which expectations were nourished by doctrinal and devotional books. In addition, it will also refer to the literature about the history of the so-called Dutch Mission—the Roman Catholic Church in the Republic of the United Provinces—in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

When T. S. Eliot contemplated the void and the darkness after the Creation, he assumed that there must have been a predetermined moment through which time was made:

We are about to meet an early eighteenth-century scholar who tackled the very same problem, the relation between the lapse of’historical’ time and the ultimate meaning of history. But to him, like so many others, time just started with the movement of the stars, which mercifully also provided adequate means for measuring it. In the beginning was chronology. And in its inexorable progress the lapse of time would also in due course spell the end of the world. But when precisely? The answer of our particular scholar to this question sounds deceptively simple. The Bible teaches that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. Again, Holy Scripture reveals that to him one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day. So here, by way of analogy, we have the outline of world history. Once having computed the date of the Creation, we can easily deduce that Our Lord Jesus Christ will return on 11 November 1740 to inaugurate his glorious reign.

Although Jesus wept while mourning the inevitable destruction of the city (Luke 19. 41), and St Paul taught the Christians of Galaria to look for it not on earth, but in heaven (cf. Gal. 4.25-6), the Christian imagination has always been haunted by the city of Jerusalem. As early as the second century Melito of Sardis travelled to Jerusalem to see for himself ‘the place where these things were preached and done’. And as soon as Christianity became a licensed religion under the protection of the Emperor, Christians from all parts of the Empire began to flock to Jerusalem to see for themselves the holy sites ubi steterunt pedes eius, where once his feet stood (Ps. 132. 7) Churches were built to mark all the places mentioned in the Gospels, monasteries were founded to receive the pilgrims, and stories began to circulate about the spectacular conversions which happened to pilgrims while visiting the Holy Places, such as that of St Mary of Egypt who turned from a nymphomaniac into a desert mother on the very doorstep of the church of the Holy Sepulchre. Quite soon earnest Church Fathers like St Jerome and St Gregory of Nyssa, both of them pilgrims to Jerusalem, had to issue dire warnings that true Christianity was a matter of the heart and not of geography, and that a trip to Palestine might perhaps be helpful but certainly not necessary in order to find Christ.

Aside from learned conjecture about the nature of the afterlife, the men and women of the late Middle Ages were as fearful as we are of what lies on the other side of death. They too were afraid of dying, afraid of what was beyond, of their own aloneness in facing death. They too had their euphemisms for the process of dying. Some went the way of all flesh: ‘Viam universe carnis ingredi’, while others migrated from this light, or from this age, to the Lord, ‘ab hac luce migraverit’, ‘ab hoc saeculo emigraverit’, ‘ad Dominum migraverit’. To comfort themselves they held up a mirror to their own society, which reflected the network of relationships which bound them in life to their lords, their tenants and servants, their families and benefactors, their fellow religious, their fellow gild brethren, townsmen, and parishioners. This image they projected into the void beyond the grave.

Nowhere were the doctrinal ambiguities of the English Church more evident than in its attitude to prayers for the dead. The problem had become evident well before 1549, in the policies of a king who claimed to be more Catholic than the Pope, but who not only dissolved monasteries, but also dismantled the shrines of the saints, and clearly threatened all intercessory foundations. The King’s Book of 1543, or A Necessary Doctrine and Erudition for any Christen Man had struck a delicate balance.

When we look at the texts with which Bach was involved, we discover that eschatology has several meanings. In many texts we find a wish for death, which is the moment in which the body finds rest and the soul is liberated from sin. Dying means also standing before Jesus, not at the day of final judgement, but immediately after death. A difference is made between the body, which is buried, and the soul, which is ascending. Sometimes death is not glorified, because one also knows the pangs of death. However death remains welcome, because all necessities disappear. Dying means going to heaven and enjoying eternal rest. The body is the dress of mortality and is given back to the earth, and then begins the time in which the faithful are with Christ. One can take leave from the sinful world with pleasure. We find this approach—that eternal life starts with dying—much more than eschatology seen as the time of the return of Christ and final judgement. So let us look at the exceptions.

Castle CAMPS in the twentieth century is a small, and in the nineteenth century was an entirely agricultural, village close to the borders of Cambridgeshire, Esssex, and Suffolk. It has a United Reformed church which was formerly Congregational and whose members at the close of the nineteenth century included the village shopkeeper. That was not unusual. What is less usual is that he was a Jew.