moved
by a belief that the millennium of the Passion would mark the day of the Lord
,
greater than any man before could have hoped to see
in his imagination of how
the final days would move people
, began to travel to the holy sepulchre of the
Saviour in Jerusalem
as Isaiah prophesied about the nations turning to Zion, in
order to be present at the mount of Olives, site of the Parousia of Jesus in power and
glory.
First the order of the inferior plebs,
it being absolutely extraordinary that
the initiative for such a tremendous event should come from the bottom up
,
then
those of middling estate, and after these the great men, that is kings, counts,
marcher lords and bishops, and eventually, and this was unheard of before
a
classic apocalyptic trope
, many women, noble and poor, undertook the journey …
and so on.
The problem with both positions is how to control them. Landes’s tech-
nique (which he calls genealogical, but perhaps archaeological would be a
better description) of seeking to track back to the writer’s earlier opinions
from the traces which they have left in his final text is perfectly reasonable
in itself, and each of the particular interpolations he suggests seems quite
persuasive in the context of the patterns of thought and usage which Landes
and so many others have found in apocalyptic works. But they are not the
only readings available. Pilgrimage might be undertaken, even on a large
scale, for reasons other than the fear of an approaching apocalypse; and that
it involved people of all ranks might be a classic apocalyptic trope, but is also
a topos associated with pilgrimage at all times, as well as with other occasions
on which normal social distinctions are set aside, such as the funerals of holy
men. To describe all such occasions as
ipso facto
apocalyptic would be stretch-
ing the term to cover a much wider series of phenomena than seems either
useful in itself or compatible with Landes’s argument about the extraordinary
nature of what was happening in his ‘millennial generation’. In short, Landes
is in some danger of meeting the fate which overtakes all conspiracy theorists,
143
Medieval Europe
of embracing a method which is capable of proving anything and therefore
proves nothing. The lack of evidence only demonstrates the lengths to which
the authorities have gone to suppress it, thus vindicating both the truth and
the potency of the theory. Landes tries to deal with this, certainly, by pointing
to cases where an unrecorded millenarianism is being argued against or
condemned by implication, but Barthélemy has no great difficulty in sug-
gesting more economical explanations, as in the case of Abbo’s preacher, that
he was simply dramatizing his call to repentance.
On the other hand, we must not use Occam’s razor to cut the branch upon
which we sit. If we apply the most rigorous standards of proof to what
everyone agrees to be fragmentary and obscure sources, do we not risk missing
much that happened, and misunderstanding much of the rest? The question
will not be resolved so long as we pose it in these terms. If our choice is
between what the texts demonstrably say and what they may plausibly be
held to imply there is nothing for either camp to do but reiterate its position
and its claim to methodological superiority. Neither, indeed, shows any sign
of flagging, but the rest of us may prefer to look for another approach. This,
I suggest, may be found by looking not just at what was said, but at what
happened, in accordance with the suggestion offered above that any hypothesis
as to whether the transformation in Western Europe was revolutionary or
evolutionary in nature, might be tested by considering whether the religious
changes which took place at the same time are amenable to the same chrono-
logy and explanation. The assumption that such a relationship is to be
expected, however, places both arguments in some danger of circularity, or at
least imposes on both protagonists the obligation to state the order of their
reasoning. Since Barthélemy has worked on social and institutional questions
for many years without showing much interest (as far as I know) in religion
per se, and had attacked
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