In the final entry in this volume of collected essays, Jay Rubenstein decries ‘the preference of modern historians of apocalyptic thought to focus on millenarianism and chronological prediction more generally’ (p. 225). Such an approach, he argues, leads to significant distortion, either by its overemphasis on fanatical outbreaks of apocalyptic fervour, such as the alleged ‘terrors of the year 1000’, or conversely by its privileging of an Augustinian anti-apocalyptic eschatology as the dominant hermeneutic of the early medieval period.

In contrast, the ten essays included in Mathew Gabriele and James Palmer's Apocalypse and reform argue that the use of apocalyptic terminology in the world of late antiquity and its medieval continuation was both much more pervasive and far less heterodox than commonly assumed. Indeed, apocalyptic language during this time period was primarily employed to encourage moral or institutional reform. The volume is organised chronologically, beginning with Veronika Wieser's examination of the Chronicle of Hydatius of c. 468 and concluding with Jehangir Malegam's discussion of Augustinian reformers of the twelfth century, bookended by Palmer and Gabriele's introduction to the volume and an afterword by Rubenstein. For the most part, they cohere together remarkably well, each entry revolving in some way around, in Rubenstein's words, ‘the complexity and real sophistication of premodern eschatology’ (p. 224).

While many of the essays are case studies which further the volume's purpose by focusing on a particular person or time period, several contributions stand out in particular. Immo Warntjes's entry ‘The final countdown and the reform of the liturgical calendar in the early Middle Ages’ (pp. 51–76) argues, contra Richard Landes, that the replacement of am (anno mundi) calendrical reckonings by the Dionysiac system in the seventh and eighth centuries was not due to the supposed crisis of a looming apocalyptic countdown, but was rather the by-product of a liturgical reform programme driven by the need for church unity. Matthew Gabriele's ‘This time: maybe this time: biblical commentary, monastic historiography, and lost cause-ism at the turn of the first millennium’ (pp. 183–204), on the other hand, focuses on how the Carolingian empire perceived itself as the final remnant of Roman imperial authority whose fall would initiate the end. Using the evidence of five monastic texts written during its failing years, he demonstrates how its defenders utilised biblical typology to provide hope of an imperial revival: ‘This time. Maybe this time. The Franks would rise again’ (p. 196).

In his ‘Afterword’, Jay Rubenstein skilfully incorporates each of the preceding essays to make his case that modern studies of apocalyptic rhetoric in the premodern world are hampered by modern assumptions about the implications of the term. ‘Far more challenging to the imagination’ of modern minds than ‘the vision of Christ appearing in a scientifically explicable nuclear explosion’, he writes, ‘is the [medieval] apocalypse of a world reformed’ (p. 227). The result is a well-crafted, tightly-focused volume which provides a necessary course correction to the academic study of the apocalypse in late antiquity and the medieval period.