‘Crisis’ is a state that takes hold of political affairs at the best of times. The word ‘crisis’ is derived from the Greek word for ‘judgement’. Applied to history it can easily assume an eerily eschatological ring. This is precisely what it does for the period and topic covered by this book. From the late fourth to the early eleventh century ad – the book's title is slightly misleading: it covers late antiquity and the early Middle Ages – apocalyptic concepts and beliefs interacted in important respects with political and social thinking and reality in the Latin and Byzantine worlds. The book's seven chapters discuss the millenarianism prevalent until 500 ad (‘Y6k’) and its reinventions in the centuries afterwards with thinkers such as Gregory the Great and Gregory of Tours, Columbanus, Isidore, Bede, Pseudo-Methodius and others. Its argument culminates in a discussion of the Carolingian Age and its immediate aftermath. The book's strength is that it treats apocalyptic thought and belief not just from a critical angle but also as a positive phenomenon, a ‘cultural resource’ (p. 227) which had the potential positively to influence and shape social and political discourse and practice in the sphere and period concerned. Palmer rejects maximalist views which tend to define the whole period as exceptionally prone to or even exclusively defined by apocalyptic thought, but he insists that apocalyptic played an important role in the way in which medieval culture dealt with the crises of its times, not always and everywhere, but on many occasions. It was not just ‘mere rhetoric’, as some have suggested (p. 224). As the bibliography shows, Palmer draws heavily on substantial continental (mainly German and French) monographs from the late 1990s and early 2000s (surrounding ‘Y2k’). Yet his account is refreshingly concise and clear while at the same time comprehensive and thorough, based as it mostly is on a close re-reading of the relevant sources. It can be recommended to anyone interested in the relevant period as well as in the role of apocalyptic and its interactions with politics and society generally, which after all remains an uncomfortably current phenomenon even today.