Can I read Martin, John Jeffries. A Beautiful Ending: The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Making of the Modern World on EtoBox?

Martin, John Jeffries. A Beautiful Ending: The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Making of the Modern World by Jonathan Locke Hart is a Arts and Humanities article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Martin, John Jeffries. A Beautiful Ending: The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Making of the Modern World about?

Let me begin at the end. That is appropriate for a book about the making of the modern world through the apocalyptic imagination, what John Jeffries Martin calls a "Beautiful Ending. " In the acknowledgments at the end of this beautifully produced book, Martin observes the beginnings of the volume and its genesis, how he found in a diffuse draft of "a history of early modern Europe from the age of Columbus to the French Revolution" a narrative that caught his attention: "the role of apocalyptic in the history of Europe and the Mediterranean from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century" (251). The book emerged unconsciously, he writes: "I hadn't self-consciously set out to work on this theme" (251). Then Martin found something that intrigued him: "Nonetheless, once this stratum emerged, I found I couldn't look away" (251). He elaborates on this fascination: "In part, I was fascinated by the hold of the apocalyptic on the imaginations of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the early modern period" (251). This role of the apocalypse took Martin to a typology of then and now: "Moreover, this story seemed also to speak to the present with our own renewed anxieties about the End of History

Who reads Martin, John Jeffries. A Beautiful Ending: The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Making of the Modern World?

Author

Jonathan Locke Hart

Publisher

University of Toronto Libraries - UOTL

Published

2023

Language

EN

Field

Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)