Abstract » Hotson
Prague 2009
Apocalypticism, Millenarianism, and Prophecy: Eschatological Expectations between East-Central and Western Europe, 1560-1670
Professor Howard Hotson
Intellectual Networks, Universal Reformation, and Early Modern Millenarianism: The status quaestionis
The paper is designed to provide a two-fold introduction, both to the topic of this workshop in particular and to the broader series which it inaugurates. Its point of departure will be the failure of past scholarship to account adequately for the universal reform movement of the mid-seventeenth century in narrowly national or confessional terms. The first part of the paper will indicate this failure with reference to two important components of that movement. First, the pansophic component of the universal reform programme will briefly be shown to originate, in large measure, in a repeatedly transplanted and disseminated tradition which derived crucial stimuli, at one period or another, from virtually every major Protestant community in Europe. Second, the current state of research on early modern apocalypticism and millenarianism will be explored in somewhat greater depth in a manner designed to show the failure to account for its significance and impact within narrowly British terms in particular. Neither pansophia nor millenarianism, it will then be argued, can be accounted for adequately in narrow national or confessional terms because both were generated by and developed within intellectual networks, centred in central Europe, which were international, multi-ethnic, and also often multi-confessional in scope. It follows from this, that the national orientation of scholarship on millenarianism in particular and the broader universal reform programme more generally needs to be supplemented by a new breed of scholarship more explicitly international in scope. The second and briefer part of the paper will be devoted to showing how the concrete conditions for such international coordination have improved steadily in the two decades since 1989 and how the structure of this current workshop and the series of which it is a part are designed to help advance this fresh wave of international scholarship on the universal reform agenda and the international networks which generated and sustained it.
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