J ay R ubenstein . Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream

What should we do when the world is catastrophically failing to live up to expectations? In his latest monograph, Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream: The Crusades, Apocalyptic Prophecy, and the End of History, Jay Rubenstein suggests that faced with inexplicable crises, a number of twelfth-century Latin Christians chose to reconsider history, above all the place of their present moment within a much grander narrative of Christian salvation. Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream argues that one of the central topoi that twelfth-century fighters and thinkers drew upon to consider the crusading movement was that of the dream of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon as described in Daniel 2:10. For Rubenstein, contemporaries’ continued attention to and reinterpretation of this dream through the twelfth century establishes the centrality of the “belief that the First Crusade was an apocalyptic event” in the crusading movement (210). In addressing the century after the First Crusade, this book picks up where Rubenstein’s previous...

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Art · Dream · Literature · Narrative · Prologue · Reinterpretation · Theology · Archaeology and Historical Studies · Historical and Linguistic Studies · History · Medieval History and Crusades · Philosophy · Psychology