Brett Whalen

His first monograph, The Pursuit of Christendom: The Medieval Church and the Conversion of the World, will appear in October 2009 with Harvard University Press. This book explores the medieval belief that Christianity would spread to every corner of the earth before the end of time. During the High Middle Ages, an era of crusade, mission, and other forms of Christian expansion, the clerical elite of the Western Church imagined the future conversion of Jews, Muslims, pagans and Eastern Christians into “one flock” under “one shepherd,” the pope of Rome. Fulfilling Christ’s promises in the Bible, the priestly leadership of the Latin West would assume a place of worldly leadership and pastoral dominion over rulers, prelates, and peoples everywhere before history’s thunderous conclusion. The end of history, however, would be fraught with peril as well as promise. The expectation of a Christian world order raised troublesome questions about the need for reform and spiritual purification within ecclesiastical institutions and society at large. By the later thirteenth century, radical apocalyptic thinkers numbered among Rome’s most outspoken critics, who prophesied a thoroughgoing transformation of the faithful both outside and inside of the Western Church’s borders—from the perspective of established clerical authorities, a subversive and dangerous reading of the future. With the decline of papal prestige and influence in the fourteenth century, the dream of world conversion and Christian expansion before the end of time did not die, but it moved in new directions. Even as things changed, Whalen suggests that the pursuit of Christendom tells us something important about the Western experience beyond the Middle Ages up until modern times.

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