This book is the history of an imaginary people -- the Red Jews -- in vernacular sources from medieval and early modern Germany. From the twelfth to the seventeenth century, German-language texts repeated and embroidered on an antisemitic tale concerning an epochal threat to Christianity, the Red Jews. This term, which expresses a medieval conflation of three separate traditions (the biblical destroyers Gog and Magog, the 'unclean peoples' enclosed by Alexander, and the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel), is a hostile designation of wickedness. The Red Jews played a major role in late medieval...

Offered here for the first time, a wide variety of specialists explore continuity and change in pre-modern Europe. Collectively, they contribute to the current historiographical debates about continuity and discontinuity between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern era. The themes reflect eminent scholar Heiko A. Oberman's vast range of interests in religious, cultural and political history across a broad chronological and conceptual spectrum that seeks to overcome the limits of the divide between Medieval and Early Modern History. Publications by Heiko A. Oberman: - Edited...

Neither the melioristpolitical culture of the nascent American republic nor its later drift toward apocalyptically tinged 'fundamentalist' Protestantism and dispensationalism can be explained outside the context of the shared Anglo-American traditions and practices of millennial expectation and apocalyptic angst--whether expressed by early colonists, Milton, Blake, Miller or the Continental Congress.In this chronologically direct and thematically varied volume, five scholars working in three distinct disciplines (Religion, English literature, and History) approach millennialism and...