During the dissolution of the former Carolingian Empire, warfare and plunder went unchecked. An innovative response to this violence was the Church-led initiative known as the Peace of God, perhaps history's earliest mass peace movement. In the thirteen essays collected here, leading scholars consider key aspects of the movement and episodes in its history.
Richard Landes is a professor of medieval history at BU. His work focuses on the role of religion in shaping and transforming the relationships between elites and commoners in various cultures, in particular the impact of "demotic religiosity" which prizes equality before the law, dignity of manual labor, and access to sacred texts and divinity for all believers.
In addition to Heaven on Earth, he has co-edited a volume on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion with Steven Katz: The Paranoid Apocalypse: A Hundred Year Retrospective on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, for which he wrote three chapters.
From 1996-2003, he directed the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University.
Following the publication of Heaven on Earth, he is currently completing the book he set aside in order to write Heaven on Earth, that is, a study of the role of millennialism in the shaping of the first thousand years of Christian history: While God Tarried: Disappointed Millennialism from Jesus to the Peace of God, 33-1033. This year he is a visiting fellow at the International Consortium for Research in the Humanities at Alexander University in Erlangen, Germany.
He has written and lectured widely on millennialism, especially in the medieval period, and more recently on the role of communications technology - from the invention of writing to modern media - in shaping public awareness and discussion, and, in some cases, in establishing and maintaining civil society. His work on the apocalyptic currents that built up during the approach to 2000 has led him to focus on Global Jihad as a) an apocalyptic millennial movement; and b) a new religious movement whose relationship to the internet may parallel that of Protestantism to printing.
In 2005 he launched a media-oversight project called The Second Draft in which he proposes to look at what the news media calls their "first draft of history." Since January 2005 he has been blogging at The Augean Stables, a name chosen to describe the current condition of the Mainstream Media in the West. When he has completed his book on medieval history he plans to write a Medievalist's Guide to the 21st Century.
