Imagining the End: Visions of

Les

trois ordres 

(



),

 

contains a powerful chapter which presents the heresies of

the early eleventh century as a response to the process of  enserfment and

seigneurialization then in full flood, and (more originally) of  the heightened

anxiety about heresy shown by Adalberto of  Laon, Gerard of  Cambrai and

others as an attempt to buttress a traditional social and political order against

the forces that were about to overwhelm it. Even more relevant to our present

concerns is the short work of  popularization, 

L’An Mil,

 which Duby had

already published in 



, consisting largely of  translations from the narrative

---

133

Medieval Europe

sources of  French history in the decades after the millennium, in which the

famous passages from Radulphus Glaber and Ademar of  Chabannes des-

cribing the so-called ‘terrors of  the Year 



’ figure prominently. Duby’s

introduction begins: ‘A people terrorised by the imminence of  the end of  the

world: in the minds of  many cultured people this image of  the year One

Thousand remains alive today despite what Marc Bloch, Henri Focillon or

Edmond Pognon have written to destroy it.’ After discussing the reasons for

the continuing fascination exercised by such ideas, and describing the Europe

of  the Year 



 as one beginning to emerge from a long period of  barbarism

and depression, he concludes: ‘the most modern interest [of  historians], the

attempt to reconstruct the pyschological attitudes of  the past, makes these

once more essential sources. Hence the texts presented in this collection are

deliberately oriented towards the history of  mentalities.’

19

 Letting the texts

speak for themselves is, for historians engaged in pedagogy, an irreproachable

objective, and doubtless explains why Duby did not find it necessary, either

in his preface or in the text or (meagre) notes and bibliography, to obtrude

upon his readers any of  the considerations which had led Bloch, Focillon or

Pognon to doubt the extent to which the peasantry of  tenth-century Europe

was prostrated by the anticipation of  the millennium. Perhaps, after all, in a

post-positivist age, it was unnecessary to fear that the readers might expect

what they read to correspond to reality.

Duby’s willingness to take the religious ideas and movements associated (or

allegedly associated) with the millennium increasingly seriously has obviously

added great authority to the recent reaction against the positivist dismissal of

these ‘millennial anxieties’ as a significant force for change. The main impulse

for re-evaluating them has sprung from a renewed interest in the narratives

of  the early eleventh century – what Richard Landes has called ‘the millennial

generation’ of  those who lived through and beyond the approach of  



 and



 – in France,

20

 especially the vast corpus of  Ademar of  Chabannes, and

from a reading of  them which owes much to interest in, and concern about,

mass and messianic movements especially of  the late twentieth century, in

which Landes has been a leading figure and will be taken here, at the cost of

some unfairness to his colleagues and collaborators which he will be the first

to deplore, as the champion and representative. In their second coming,

however, millenarian anxieties and expectations are regarded less as the source

of  paralysing terror which for the Romantics kept Europeans cowering in

stagnation, than as an energizing and liberating force which inspired them

momentarily to throw off  the shackles of  custom and exploitative lordship,

and in doing so to provoke a repressive reaction which helped to consolidate

the new seigneurial regime. This, of  course, is a perspective which derives

from the insights of  modern social theory, especially as they were introduced

---

134

Medieval and Early Modern Periods

to medievalists by Norman Cohn in what remains one of  the twentieth

century’s most exciting books on the middle ages,