Last Judgements (Excerpt from the book On Earthly Delights: A Novel Theory of Paradise) — Rebecca Ariel Porte

There are things I don’t remember about that night at the Hotel Paradise: how we managed the graceless choreography it takes for strangers to traverse the infinite space between Point Α, the bar, and Point Ω, the hotel room. Was there a cramped elevator ride? How close did we stand, never touching, before we reached the room and one of us fumbled the door open and then closed again. Was the lock released with a card or, in keeping with the general air of dilapidation, an analog key? There were no elective affinities, which is to say all things were decision in the guise of fate.

Alone with him, I opened the door to the balconet and undid a button at the collar of my only dress (eau de Nil shot silk, extremely second-hand, almost imperceptible hole where the side-seam disappeared into the left armpit). The Seducer slouched against the headboard in shirtsleeves, wearing a slightly too studied air of dissipation, which was irritating because effective. The goodness of the world as a foregone conclusion, he’d said. Was that the minimum required for paradise? 

“Just think,” he continued, unbuttoning his cuffs, “of the manifest comfort of knowing your suffering has meaning in some larger design, of believing you know how (and maybe even when) the world will end.” He ran his eyes over the postcard where it lay on a low table at the foot of the bed, less, probably, because he had suddenly remembered it and more because he wanted to recall me to my stake in the wager. Never before had I felt I’d held someone’s attention so completely. The allure of this condition did not overtake the alarm. I was resistless.

“I’ve read too much Nietzsche, though. He thought that kind of thing was the solace of the weak for their weakness. Not that I need to tell you.” (Note 1)

“We were speaking of foregone conclusions,” he said innocently.

“The Problem of Evil—so gauche, so goyish.”

“So good for a one-night stand. Look,” he said, indicating the postcard again, “from the right angle, all hearts are shaped like corkscrews…do you think their world is a good one?”

“The worldlings’?”

That had amused him. “Worldlings—you are that.” The sands in the hourglass gleamed. “Among the constellations wheeling above our heads,” he said, “are the clusters that used to be named for the Argonauts’ ship in less astronomically sophisticated eras. Mariners sometimes navigated by Argo, especially the line of stars now called Pyxis, the compass: Alpha, Beta, and Gamma Pyxidis.”

“You mean: find something to steer by,” I said. 

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Milton’s Eden was a plot constrained, bound by walls as Paradise Lost was bound by the stricture of blank verse, “apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another.” (Note 2) When Blake remarked that Milton wrote “in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God,” he’d been right in a sense quite other than what he meant. (Note 3) In Milton’s epic, form’s fetters (like divine prohibitions, like the walls of the Garden) imparadised. They generated a poetic luxury, the kind that only became available when the order of things was obvious. It was a fantasy of poetic form as paradise, disorderly life organized by art, not into perfection, but into profusion beyond what daily life could supply, all the variables controlled for, all the materials required (and no more) for the experiment to proceed, including the necessary snakes and rebel angels. Even these were essential to the design. John Donne had said it best: “And that this place may thoroughly be thought, / True paradise, I have the serpent brought.” (Note 4)

There was a word for what the Seducer was asking me to contemplate: “theodicy,” the attempt to vindicate the world’s disasters according to a benevolent plan. No one had ever tried harder to win that game than Milton after his great cause had failed: the destruction of kingship and the establishment of a republican commonwealth, which, for a brief time, had triumphed, before Cromwell turned on his critics, believing that it could not be God’s will that he permit dissent. (Satan, of Milton’s greatest poem, bore a passing resemblance to the Lord Protector.) But the revolution had already betrayed itself many times over and, after the return of royal sovereignty, it was no longer possible not to recognize that the revolt had only, temporarily, replaced one ruling class with another. So the poet, who’d argued for regicide “as oft” as the governed “shall judge it for the best,” set himself, now, in Paradise Lost, the task of coming to terms with the restoration of the monarchy as part of a providential plan. The earthly war against authority had been punished and its punishment had, now, to be understood as consonant with God’s orders. Rather than discarding the idea that the world operated according to a benevolent design, Milton had assigned himself the task of advocating God’s cause, regardless of the spitefulness of Grace. Why had God allowed the revolution to fail and what did it mean to live through its failure? (Note 5) The poem promised to “justify the ways of God to men” through the story of the Fall. (Note 6) In this way, Paradise Lost took on the origins of death, sin, fate, and free will in the Garden of Eden and in Milton’s cancelled revolution. To fathom all this, he needed parsimony in his paradise and he had to bring the serpent with him so he could observe how a form of life destroyed itself in a controlled setting. That was also a kind of poetic luxury.

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The world was always ending, an unremarkable insight, really, but hard to keep a grip on it, all the same. The inexplicable thing was the regular recurrence of human surprise (it had surprised even Milton) that life after world’s end simply went on. Compared to this volatile murk, the austerity of the single prohibition in the Garden of Eden—“thou shalt not eat”—must have seemed a miracle of reassurance. Milton’s paradise rang with longing for a good world where order and simplicity reigned, pleasure was ample, and where the equal and opposite reaction to every action was as ready to discernment as the motion of Newton’s cradle. 

I had no love for innocence. But how many nights had I lain awake nights in the shaming grip of fantasies in which the past could be undone and my life or some passage in the world’s life rewritten in a way that would leave no room for ambivalence or doubt? In paradise’s vision of maximum richness within minimal constraint lay a fantasy of clarity about how to navigate an uncertain life—and, in the Temptation in the Garden of Eden, a parable about how fragile this fantasy really was, how easily destroyed by the least murmur from reality. The noise and fog of the actual rushed in with terrible force as soon as I came back from a sojourn in paradise. Whatever temporary relief I had purchased was often eclipsed by the intensity of my dissatisfaction after I came back to myself. 

The recollection of those half-waking dreams in the mornings-after humiliated me more than any one-off tryst gone awry. Would that it had been a single offense! Each time I spent such a night, I murdered paradise to regain my own. But this fable of a ruthlessly arranged world, killed so many times, was remarkably cavalier about death. Paradise’s capacity for resurrection seemed truly perverse in light of its uselessness, its impotent complaints against the status quo. It judged the world as-is to be insufficient but offered no remedies and no convincing evidence that what was wanting would, eventually, be justified. I’d never spoken to my friend of the black page about this particular shame. It only occurred to me to wonder, now, if she’d ever shared it and, as I had, hidden it.

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Milton followed a long line of theologians and philosophers who had practiced or refuted theodicy, reasoning in favor of God’s goodness, despite the demonstrable cruelties of his creation. Everything would, they believed, be validated at last by the divine redemption of the wicked earth for which they were waiting. I knew that Augustine of Hippo had argued that all things tended toward this future, visible only through a glass darkly. In time, he thought, the new heavens and the new earth would reveal the hand of God clearly to faith and the body alike. (Note 7) Under the influence of this “salvation history,” generations of Christians would rationalize the trials of the world as preludes to a Last Judgement that would come in their own lifetimes, an end to all earthly ambiguity and an explanation for why it had happened like that, doled out as providence collected its debts. That was the world Bosch had inherited, two hundred years before Milton arrived on the scene, on the lip of modernity’s dawn in Europe. I said to the Seducer: “Watchman, what of the night?”

“Which night? Or which species of night? There are more species of night than even the connoisseurs have catalogued—and we’ve only got one, ourselves.”

“What do you know about the kind that are supposed to change everything and don’t?”

“Nox communis, that is, the garden variety. Nights before the stay of execution or the revolution, aborted or successful, after which everyone will simply have to start making decisions all over again, the night before the verdict or the arrival of a message, long-delayed, or a person, loved or hated, or a package with the latest generation of the product. Nights of consummation or conflagration or the truth will out. Nights that perch sourly on the eaves, chased with comets, who winnow the extremophile lice from their streaming beards with curry combs studded with chips of ice and metals forged in the hearts of stars. Though maybe you really mean the morning after?”

“When do the prophets fail?”

“Do you know, I don’t think I’ve ever met a failed prophet? Only failed prophecies. Remarkably resilient to externalities, prophets. Comes with the starter pack.”

“I was thinking of ends. You know, cultic mass suicides before the alien rapture, the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, multilevel marketing schemes with a guaranteed payout, full automation, full privatization, blockchain, artificial intelligence, the end of history…” 

“You were thinking of asking me to play devil’s advocate.”

“For my purposes, God has enough.”

“A triumph of public relations,” said the Seducer. “When?”

“When what?”

“When should I take the devil’s part?”

“This is getting a little Manichaean. Do you remember the date of Bosch’s Last Judgement?”

“I remember them all, more or less, but if you want to begin there, you really have to begin at least a hundred years earlier. Turn of the fourteenth century.”

“A sommelier of finality.” 

“—of when the judgement doesn’t come. The bottles pour air and ashes but the cellar never runs dry.”

“Well, what was it like?”

“A general crisis. Things were reaching their limit everywhere. If you’d looked at it all from some unimaginable height, you’d have seen serfs, bound to the land and their liege lords, who could get no good of the soil anymore. And what would there have been to say about the rent to the lethal brutes in their stinking keeps? That the soil was exhausted and had to be left fallow? That there was only so much land they could take from the sheep and the cattle to supply the loss? Everyone knew it was blood from a stone. More people now and less unclaimed land to farm. Storms came—dust, wind, rain—so the low-lying fields flooded and whatever they’d managed to grow rotted on the stalk. 

“You’d have seen, very faintly, mottling on the sea, which would’ve resolved itself into ships, heavy-laden with wine and flax to weave linen, with wool or livestock. Trade had expanded across the known world and, in distressed Europe, these were what they could sell in exchange for the grain that had to be imported for the bread. Depleted soil, weary silver mines, too, which gave no ore and the mints no bullion for their specie. Inflation soared. And for the delicate classes, silk, spices, and glass cost the earth. You’d have seen the smoking heaps left behind when aristocrats took to open banditry or sold themselves as mercenaries to fill their coffers.

“You’d have seen how the civil war raged in Spain, how York and Lancaster waged their battles in England, how the hundred heads of the Hundred Years’ War roused themselves for another round of combat. And then there were the famines and the Black Death scudding through in 1348. If you’d turned your eyes to Palestine, you’d have seen a judge’s clerk in Aleppo, scratching out an essay with a shaky pen, for, oh, what a visitor! China was not preserved from this plague, nor could the strongest fortress stand in its way. The Indians suffered it in India and it fell heavy upon the Sind. Its hand seized the Uzbek lands and how many backs it broke in Transoxiana, the clerk couldn’t say. Persia, Khitai, and Crimea were its meat. On Rūm, it rained live coals and from there to Cyprus and the islands. Cairo, destroyed, and each eye wide-awake, for the plague was like a silkworm and the workers who wove the silks for which Egypt was justly famed met the fates that Allah decreed. In Alexandria the streets are silent.

“Look, now, to Italy: terror so complete that people of close degree abandon each other to the egg-shaped swellings and the three days of fever and pain before the heart gives out. Look how they scurry down the roads as if they could outrun their deaths on foot or by horseback. Bodies line the byways. Parents of the afflicted will not nurse their children, as if they were become strangers. (Note 8) Look everywhere, look how the lighted windows diminish and the distance between them expands until they resemble pinpricks made in a black canvas through which a feeble candle shines…”

“And it was like that?”

“It was like this: landholders strapped for cash, strapped for workers to till the land. Before the remaining able-bodied would pick up the plough or the hoe, the feudal classes had to quadruple the fee. More and more serfs free to flee to repopulating cities and sell their labor in the growing centers of commerce. Commodity exchange the new rule. Taxes punishing and the peasants in revolt in Flanders, in England, in Calabria. For a summer, the guild-less wool-workers of Florence held the city under provisional rule. (Note 9) And if you’d kept your gaze steady until the fifteenth century shambled in, you’d have seen how local calamity seized people in bursts and flares. In the lifetime of your man of the forest, farmers along the Upper Rhine rose up under the flag of the bound shoe. Even in ’s-Hertogenbosch, where he lived, there were criers and shouters and copies of Hartmann Schedel’s Buch der Chroniken, which said that the rainbow had two principal colors, even if some spoke of six or four, and the watery color signified the deluge passed and the fiery one the coming judgement by flame and the first no longer anyone’s concern and the second, soon, soon…” (Note 10)

Disquiet built in me. In the central panel of the Vienna Last Judgement, Bosch’s Christ hovered on high over a burning earth, seated on a rainbow (which must have been the rainbow of fire) while the preponderance of humanity writhed below under the ministrations of attendant demons. And yet, there was no sense of distant futurity about the painting. The monstrosities went about their work with prosaic good humor, content in ordinary pleasures as none of their victims ever would be again. Bosch had painted the scene with the familiarity of a person passing through a landscape with which he was intimate. 

The Seducer went on. “Where was I? The fifteenth century? A fascinating vintage. It was like this: otherworldly rumors multiplied, inflamed by the apocryphal Revelations, which mixed with the flood of Gnostic texts driven west, along with the Christian hordes and the last of Byzantium, from the city the Ottomans had renamed Istanbul in 1453. Popular prophets, the fruit of crisis, abounded among the Christians. They warned of an earth returned to a second Eden by divine mercy or divine violence. Millenarians, those. Some. The optimists. (Note 11) Others, just as cheerful, dreamed of a world’s end drawn up to specification. One clean sweep and purged the earth and the few, the elect, gathered up to dwell on high. None of your aimless, endlessly prolonged dooms for these. Something simple, something with mass appeal. The printing presses were up and running and prophecy sold well. 1484 was a good year for that kind of thing. Astrologers, clergy, and humanists agreed it would be reasonable to expect the great event to happen then. da Correggio rode through the streets of Rome, proclaiming himself the angel of wisdom. Savonarola was preaching and dreaming of theocracy in Florence. After the mad priest burned, Botticelli, a Florentine, remember, had a hard time giving up the vision. He inscribed it on a strange Nativity: ‘I Sandro painted this picture at the end of the year 1500 in the troubles of Italy,’ he wrote. It was the second woe of the Apocalypse, he wrote, but the devil would yet be chained and they would ‘see him trodden down as in this picture.’ They were waiting, all of them, for a judgement that wouldn’t come…” (Note 12)

I was thinking of how little space the celestial round took up in Bosch’s Last Judgement, how much the darkness. And I was thinking of the fires that blazed in the buildings in the background of the central panel, the barren, brown-red of the earth, the damned sentenced to their own bodies, changed to hard volumes of distended flesh, filled or dismembered and fried like sausages by those bluff demons, so like innkeepers, goodwives, blacksmiths, soldiers, messengers. The same, always the same, in that place where nothing grew any longer. 

“…engines of war trundled across the landscape without cease. Wars drive a certain kind of invention. Comes of having to get more use from stressed resources. Alongside the prophets, there were miners and bankers and they both got quite a lot out of the ground over the course of the fourteen-hundreds. With new methods, they managed to press the earth for more of what it gave up so grudgingly. Wars took credit, credit, banks, banks, silver. Ironworks belched effluent into the air and the water. Forge and furnace—can you see them?—blackening the grasses, painting gray crusts on the riverbanks. The factors, iron and silver, labored at their ledgers, sighing over the expense of the charcoal, which came from wood, which came (damn it all) from trees, which came from forests, which were fast dwindling. But did Lord So-and-So or Master Thus-and-Such care a jot about what it took a put-upon employee to come up with the requisite number of pikes and lances and good, hard coins and bars? And with these new laws about felling trees and the villeins up in arms again about the enclosure of the forests in Germany. Well, it was trouble was all, and there were rumblings among the miners, which was a bother. Wouldn’t it be better to indemnify? Get the iron from Sweden? And one heard, all the time, about favorable rates on copper from Norway if one knew the right people. The Muscovites could come up with the wood (they weren’t hurting for trees). And soon enough, the grumbling factors could apply to the powers who’d run smack dab into a New World for enough gold and silver to rebuild Alexander’s empire in a year. 

“Easier, you see, to expand than to look to the interior for a way out. The costs of conquering at home were high, abroad, comparatively low. They needed cheap, new land and cheap, new labor. Now, it’s not an option anymore, is it, new lands, new populations? Of course, there have been the most astonishing innovations…” (Note 13)

“Stop.”

“But it was like this,” he replied, “Columbus, dogged by visions of the end, set off at Spain’s command to butcher Amerindians. (Note 14) Ahuitzotl, the water monster, ruled the Aztecs before the Spanish conquest and Moctezuma after it had begun. The Taíno and the Caxcan, the Chichimeca and the Cimarrons under Bayano revolted in waves. The Inca rump state held out at Vilcabamba. Chili peppers, potatoes, and maize from the New World had reached China, where the Ming Dynasty held the imperial seat. In Japan, the Sengoku period raged, two hundred years’ worth of blood, give or take. One class of landed seigneurs down, another takes its place. The Afghan Lodi governed the Delhi Sultanate until the trade route across the Deccan Plateau dried up. And then they did not. The Mamluks, manumitted soldier-slaves, were on their way out in Egypt. (Forced labor was widespread the world over.) Between the Chari River and Lake Chad, the Bagirmi Kingdom was on its way in. In the Horn of Africa, the Adal had grown rich and restive…”

“Please, stop.” 

“Alright. You know all this, anyway. You just don’t want to know it.”

It seemed to take a long time for my breathing to slow, for me to register the curious texture of the counterpane, which felt not unlike the crescent of scar tissue below his collarbone, with which he’d doubtless decorated himself for effect. It was like the mouches eighteenth-century dandies wore on their faces to set off their beauty or to hide old wounds, spots, sores. Thus do devil’s advocacies conclude, I thought. He’d played it sincerely, as I’d asked, arrayed before me everything that militated against the goodness of the world as a foregone conclusion, which could be summed up in the feel of having survived the end of a world. 

How was it possible to live past a Last Judgement that had never arrived to prove pain a prelude to joy? There was the bind. If a worldview was that which hailed you, which said to you “this is your creed,” whether that was “from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead” or “as much Land as a Man Tills, Plants, Improves, Cultivates, and can use the Product of, so much is his Property” or “socialism or barbarism,” then survival past the point when vindication should have come left you with three options, none of which were fully satisfying. (Note 15)

You could recommit, as Milton had, to resurrecting the voice that had called you (“it still holds, I was just wrong about how or when or why”), adopt a new worldview (anything from nihilism to positivism, depending on the origin point), or content yourself with slipping between worldviews, with tatters and patches, with being hailed only occasionally and sometimes wrongly. (No, there was a fourth option, but it meant giving up everything.) Bosch, man of the forest, had painted that receding heaven in the Last Judgement, that treeless earth of the interregnum, peppered with the blazing ironworks the demons must have needed for their spears and frying pans as much as the living had. The painting seemed to cling to a just world that ironized the possibility of exoneration. No one, the triptych seemed to say, could possibly deserve it. The ratio of damnation to salvation there was unbearable. One unbroken congeries of destruction, the center panel and the right panel, Stygian, made a continuous hellscape with no differentiation between the activities on earth and in hell. How little the painting seemed to believe its own argument about a justice whose operations were proportionate. 

It wasn’t only that the path of virtue was narrow and choked with briars. It was that even those souls assured of the painted heaven seemed to move against the tide, as if they, too, were unsure of having escaped. Drowned out, almost, by the visual cacophony of earthly tortures, a single angel at the edge of the center panel led a man by the hand up one of the ruddy slopes of the blighted earth. They faced, as so few souls in the middle did, toward the left panel, toward the earthly paradise, as if they were looking back toward it. Directly above the pair was the slim tract of sky where a paltry number of souls, flown by their own ministering angels, disappeared into the clouds, barely visible. (Note 16) One of these pairs, parallel to, analogous to the angel and the man about to ascend, looked, like them, toward Eden. These four gazes against all gravity and time, recalled the story of the Dutch boy who’d saved the country by jamming his finger into a dike that threatened to give way to the sea. Stuck overnight, he shivered in the cold until the villagers happened upon him and made the repair. Here, though, no relief came. In Bosch’s interregnum, rescue was skeptical of itself. The triptych encouraged a person to read it left to right, Eden to Hell. The angelic pairs seemed frail in the inertia of that motion, which was like a strong wind. You could look to Eden, they said. You could look back to the past, but there was no salvation there, no unwinding. The wind couldn’t be reversed, the trees unsevered from their roots, the ores restored to their mines, the dead made to live again. Earthbound in that hot, vacant place, the souls suffered and the demons clocked in and never out.

And in The Garden of Earthly Delights? Were they already condemned to live past a last judgement? The worldlings in the central panel didn’t seem prone to expectation. Nonetheless, a feeling of suspension permeated the Garden scene in the frantic quality of its pleasures. They, too, had Eden to the left and Hell to the right, lived at the median of Eden and Inferno, which mingled in the Garden of Delights. The worldlings did not foresee a judgement, perhaps. But their innocence allowed them the rights of invention and the right to enlist others in their invention with no preference given to what might go well or ill: a group rushing into a mammoth eggshell in mysterious exhilaration, a hushed conference in the whisper gallery of a transparent blossom. Although they took the abundance of the world for granted, they seemed less given to regarding goodness of any kind as a foregone conclusion and more to pursuing, by all available means, a complete accounting of sensuous possibility. Their passion for the world, their ignorance of where action would take them—these were like mine—even though the worldlings’ rule consisted, as mine never could, of abandon in the face of this obliviousness to the effects they might bring about. (I was, as yet, studiously ignoring the Hell panel.) Rather than a good world, it seemed to me one where the inimical simply had to be lived with. 

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1 See Friedrich Nietzsche, “First Essay: ‘Good and Evil,’ ‘Good and Bad’,” On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (Vintage Books, 1967/89), 24 – 56.  

2 Milton, “The Verse,” Paradise Lost, 3 – 4. 

3 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake: The Complete Poems, ed Alicia Ostriker (Penguin Books, 1977/2004), 182.

4 John Donne, “Twickenham Garden,” The Complete English Poems, ed. A.J. Smith (Penguin Books, 1971/96), li. 8 – 9, p. 82.

5 John Milton, The tenure of kings and magistrates proving that it is lawfull, and hath been held so through all ages, for any who have the power, to call to account a tyrant, or wicked king, and after due conviction, to depose (London: Matthew Simmons, 1649), 13 https://name.umdl.umich.edu/A50955.0001.001; See Orlando Reade’s What In Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost (Astra House, 2024) for an orientation to radical readings of the political agon in Milton’s poem.

6 Milton, Paradise Lost, Bk. I, li. 24 – 26, p. 6.

7 See Augustine, Concerning The City of God against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (Penguin Books, 1972/2003).

8 Abū Hafs ‘Umar Ibn al-Wardī, “Essay on the Report of the Pestilence,” ca. 1348 in John Aberth The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 1348 – 1350: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005), 16 – 18; Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam (Penguin Books, 1972), 50 – 57.

9 Richard C. Trexler, “Neighbours and Comrades: The Revolutionaries of Florence, 1378,” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Anthropology, no. 14 (December 1983): 53-106; Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (Verso, 2013), 197 – 209; Léopold Genicot, “Crisis: From the Middle Ages to Modern Times” in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, Vol. I: The Agrarian Life of the Middle Ages, 2nd. Ed., ed. M.M. Postan (Cambridge University Press, 1966), 660 – 741; Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers, “Patterns of Urban Rebellion in Medieval Flanders” in Communes and Conflict: Urban Rebellion in Late Medieval Flanders, eds. Andrew Murray and Joannes van den Maagdenberg (Brill, 2023), 11 – 39 and “ ‘Criers and Shouters’: The Discourse on Radical Urban Rebels in Late Medieval Flanders,” Journal of Social History, Vol. 42, no. 1 (Fall, 2008): 111-135; David M. Nicholas, “Town and Countryside: Social and Economic Tensions in Fourteenth-Century Flanders,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 10, No. 4 (July 1968): 458-485; Tom Scott, “The Peasants’ War: A Historiographical Review, Part I,” The Historical Journal, Vol. 22, no. 3 (September 1979): 693 – 720; Bo Lindberg, “The Fire Next Time,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 35 (1972): 187- 199.

10 Popular prophecy, often inspired by the millenarian Joachimites, who first came to prominence in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, came in both optimistic and pessimistic strains. See Donald Weinstein on popular prophecy in Savonarola and Florence: Prophesy and Patriotism in the Renaissance (Princeton University Press, 1970), 93 and Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism, 393 – 508. 

11 See Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and Its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements, 2nd. Ed. (Harper Torchbooks/The Academy Library, 1961); Last Things: Death & the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, eds. Caroline Walker Bynum and Paul Freedman (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); Encyclopedia of Millennialism and Millennial Movements, Vol. 1, ed. Richard Landes (Routledge, 2000), 457 – 462;  Richard H. Popkin, “Savonarola and Cardinal Ximines: Millenarian Thinkers and Actors at the Eve of the Reformation” in Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture, Vol. 2, Catholic Millenarianism from Savonarola to the Abbé Grégoire, ed. Karl A. Kottmann (Springer Science and Business Media, 2001), 15 – 26; Frederic J. Baumgartner, Longing for the End: A History of Millennialism in Western Civilization (Palgrave, 1999), 63 – 100.

12 Weinstein, Savonarola and Florence, 88 – 97, 334 – 335, and 32 – 33; Jonathan Green, Printing and Prophecy: Prognostication and Media Change 1450 – 1550 (The University of Michigan Press), 1 – 61. 

13 See Jason W. Moore, “Nature and the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center), Vol. 26, no. 2, Ecology of the Modern World-System (2003): 97-172; Genicot, “Crisis,” 660 – 741; Fernand Braudel, “European Expansion and Capitalism, 1450 – 1650” in Chapters in Western Civilization, Vol. I, eds. Contemporary Civilization Staff of Columbia College, Columbia University (Columbia University Press 1948/61), 245 – 288; Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II, Vol. I, trans. Siân Reynolds (Harper & Row, 1972), Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism, trans. P.M. Ranum (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), Civilization and Capitalism Vol. 1, The Structures of Everyday Life, The Limits of the Possible, trans. Siân Reynolds (University of California Press, 1981/85), The Wheels of Commerce, trans. S. Reynolds (Harper & Row, 1982/92), The Perspective of the World, trans. Siân Reynolds (Harper & Row, 1984); Robert Brenner, “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism” in The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, eds. T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin (Cambridge University Press, 213 – 327); Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (Verso, 2002), 73 – 121; Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (University of California Press, 1974/2011) and The Modern World System, II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600 – 1750 (University of California Press, 1980/2011).

14 Jean Delumeau, History of Paradise: The Garden of Eden in Myth and Tradition, trans. Matthew O’Connell, (University of Illinois Press, 1992), 110.

15 These are, respectively, the Apostles’ Creed, John Locke (“Second Treatise of Government,” Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett [Cambridge University Press, 1960/88], §32, p. 290), and Rosa Luxemburg (performing some creative misprision with Engels; the Junius Pamphlet, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, ed. Mary-Alice Waters, trans. Socialist Publication Society [Pathfinder Press, 1970], 269). See, also, Geuss, Who Needs A World View?, 1 – 2.

16 See Hannah Kagan-Moore, “The Journey through the Judgement: Affective Viewing and the Monstrous in Bosch’s Vienna Last Judgment Triptych,” Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural, Preternatural Environments, Vol. 5, no. 2 (2016): 133 – 158 and Koerner, Bosch and Bruegel, 58 – 65.