A Beautiful Ending: The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Making of the Modern World

Martin, John Jeffries

ISBN 10: 030024732X / ISBN 13: 9780300247329

Published by Yale University Press, 2022

About this Item

Seller Inventory # BSM.UYD8

Bibliographic Details

• Title: A Beautiful Ending: The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Making of the Modern World
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication Date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 030024732X
• ISBN 13: 9780300247329
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: very_good

About this title

Synopsis

An award-winning historian’s revisionary account of the early modern world, showing how apocalyptic ideas stimulated political, religious, and intellectual transformations
 
“A masterful synthesis of the prognostications of faith, knowledge, and politics on a global stage. Martin’s book illuminates one of the enduring themes that shaped the medieval and early modern world.”—Paula E. Findlen, Stanford University
 
In this revelatory immersion into the apocalyptic, messianic, and millenarian ideas and movements that created the modern world, John Jeffries Martin performs a kind of empathic time travel, entering into the psyche, spirituality, and temporalities of a cast of historical actors in profound moments of discovery. He argues that religious faith—Christian, Jewish, and Muslim—did not oppose but rather fostered the making of a modern scientific spirit, buoyed along by a providential view of history and nature, and a deep conviction in the coming End of the World.
 
Through thoughtful attention to the primary sources, Martin re‑reads the Renaissance, excavating a religious foundation at the core of even the most radical empirical thinking. Familiar icons like Ibn Khaldūn, Columbus, Isaac Luria, and Francis Bacon emerge startlingly fresh and newly gleaned, agents of a history formerly untold and of a modern world made in the image of its imminent end.

About the Author

John Jeffries Martin is professor and former chair of the Department of History at Duke University. His books include Venice’s Hidden Enemies and Myths of Renaissance Individualism. He lives in Hillsborough, NC.