The Pursuit of the Millennium

The Pursuit of the Millennium is the book Edward reads twice in a year, drawn to its account of medieval apocalyptic movements and their leaders. It gives shape to his interest in historical extremity: from the safety of an ordinary life, he studies episodes of religious frenzy with horrified fascination, and considers making them the subject of further work.

Edward’s Reading and Historical Interest

That summer, after his final examinations, Edward is absorbed by accounts of medieval cults whose leaders proclaim themselves the Messiah. The book describes followers who, under the influence of apocalyptic ideas from the Book of Revelation and the Book of Daniel, believe the end of the world is near and that only the pure will be saved. They identify the Pope as the Antichrist, and groups moving through the German countryside massacre Jews, priests, and sometimes wealthy people. Authorities violently suppress one movement, only for another sect to emerge elsewhere a few years later.

Edward reads these recurrent episodes from within what he regards as the dullness and safety of his own existence. His horrified fascination is sharpened by the contrast: religion, he thinks, has generally faded into insignificance in his own time. He wonders whether his degree will be good enough for doctoral study and considers making medieval movements of this kind his subject.

From Possible Doctorate to Biography Project

The book’s subject also enters Edward’s larger ambition to write short histories of obscure people who briefly stood near the centre of important events. While walking with Florence Ponting, he describes a proposed series about such figures, including Sir Robert Carey, whose arduous ride from London to Edinburgh to announce Elizabeth I’s death brought him little advancement under James VI of Scotland.

After a conversation with Violet Ponting, Edward decides that one of the medieval cultists he has been reading about should join the series. This shifts the book’s material from a possible single academic subject into one component of a broader, imagined project. Edward pictures each history as no longer than two hundred pages, illustrated and published by Penguin Books, with the completed series potentially issued in a boxed set.

Konrad Schmid and the Book’s Place in the Narrative

The cultist Edward selects is Konrad Schmid, a flagellant Messiah of the 1360s. Schmid and his followers claim that his coming was foretold in the prophecies of Isaiah; they cast Christ as his precursor, while Schmid is proclaimed both God and the Emperor of the Last Days. His followers practise self-flagellation, obey him, and pray to him. Edward believes Schmid was probably burned at the stake by the Inquisition in 1368, after which the large following dissipated.

These details make the proposed biography an especially stark example of Edward’s interest in lives that flare briefly and then recede. The collapse of Schmid’s following supplies a historical counterpoint to the ambitious permanence Edward imagines for his own series: the cult disappears, while Edward pictures its story preserved in an illustrated book. The Pursuit of the Millennium therefore connects his private reading, his tentative academic plans, and the biographical project he describes to Florence.