The Pursuit of the Millennium

Norman Cohn’s study of the millenarian movements that swept through medieval and Reformation Europe: the prophets of the poor, the flagellant processions, the Free Spirit heretics, the peasant risings, and the Anabaptist kingdom at Münster. Cohn traces a recurring structure: a corrupt world about to end, an elect destined to rule, an enemy to be exterminated first. He shows how it took hold among the uprooted and marginal of a rapidly changing society. Written in the shadow of the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century, the book argues that these fantasies did not die with the Middle Ages.