The 'car looo 435 ter of 1885. He admitted the refutation of the narrative evidence, but still thought that in the charters the formula about the end of the world grew more frequent as the year 1000 approached. But even while he spoke his younger colleague, M. Jules Roy, was preparing, for the popular Biblioth'cqiic des Men'cillcs, a little mono- graph which should not only dispel such lingering doubts, but reach the ear of a wider public' This interesting little volume, after dealing with the whole history of the fear of the end of the world and refuting tlie legend of the year 1000, portrays from the sources the real condition of the world and especially of France in the last half of the tenth century and the first of the eleventh. At almost the same time a young Italian scholar who has since won eminence as an historian — Pietro Orsi — was making the year 1000 and its legend the subject of a thesis at the University of Turin. First presented in 1884, it was able, before its publication in 1887 in the Rivista Storica Italiana, to take cognizance of Roy's book, and is for scholars the most methodical and exhaustive ex- position of its theme." But, though more complete, its results tally with those of Plaine and Rosieres and Eicken and Roy ; and at the end its author can but echo their conclusion : " The terrors of the year lOOO are only a legend and a myth." Nor has any scholar, since the first assault, a quarter-century ago, cared to print a word in protest. But, I hear you exclaim, you who have felt how awesome, even in these rational days, is the ending of a century, how could there help being terror, in that age, at the close of a millennium ? It was, I am convinced, precisely this sense of intrinsic probability which made it so easy for scholars else cautious and thorough to fall into the error; and it may be worth a moment to ask why such a panic was not then so natural as at first appears. First of all, and most important, the belief in the end of the world was already worn out. It had cried " Wolf" too often. It began with the very first generation of Christians, and sought a warrant in the words of the Christ himself Almost the oldest Christian book we have — the second letter of Paul to the Thessa- lonians — is a protest against it. But it lived on. It found an echo in the Apocalypse and in the letters ascribed to Peter and to Jude. It sounded on through the Fathers, from Tertullian to Gregory the ' L'An Mille : Formation de la Legends de l' An Milk, —Etat de la France de I' an 950 dl'an lojo (Paris, 1885), 351 pp. There is at the end an excellent bibliography. 2 V Anno Mille : Saggio di Critica Storica (Torino, 1SS7), 62 pp., reprinted from the Rivista Storica Italiana, Vol. IV. (1887). In 1891 Professor Orsi threw it into briefer popular form for a lecture, at Venice, on Lc Paure del Finimondo nell' Anno 1000. This was also published (Turin, 1891, 31 pp.).
