Apocalypse Then

This is, in many ways, quite a disappointing book. It seems intended to accompany—or to have grown out of—a North American university course on the contribution of apocalyptic culture to Western Civilisation. Nonetheless, Apocalypse Then falls between two stools: often too sophisticated for its target audience of undergraduates and general readers, yet at times too superficial to convince consistently the expert. Consequently it is neither textbook nor specialist work. Trying too hard on occasions to please students—‘no graduate students need apply’ (p. 109), ‘no sacred Cliff Notes’ (p. 20), ‘turn up at seminars, drop in at academic cocktail parties’ (p. 181), ‘music, dancing, and, oh yes seminars and lectures’ (p. 244)—Williamson has several deft one-liners that are almost counterbalanced in equal measure by some jarring turns of phrase. Thus, on the one hand, he writes that Jesus ‘clearly did not anticipate a new faith, much less a church’ (p. 9); that Protestantism was ‘so resolutely text-based, so emphatically a religion of the Word’ (p. 57); that ‘a world without the apocalypse remained a world without a master narrative’ (p. 230): but, on the other hand, Charles Stuart's trial and execution ‘resulted from his bottomless, truly Nixonian duplicity’ (p. 161), allegations of Quaker female public nudity are reduced to ‘chicks up front!’ (p. 188), the Quaker leader James Nayler's female followers are ‘groupies’ (p. 189), while even the élite priest-scientists of Tommaso Campanella's utopian City of the Sun like to ‘have a good shag’ on rare occasions (p. 117)

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