Reformist Apocalypticism and Piers Plowman.

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton's Reformist Apocalypticism and Piers Plowman (Cambridge: U.P., 1990; pp. xii + 256. [pounds]30) is an illuminating study of the relation of the prophetic passages in Piers Plowman to the medieval apocalyptic tradition, and more specifically to what she calls reformist apocalypticism. The latter is distinguished from earlier and non-reformist apocalypses, as it is from traditional Augustinianism, in foretelling not the imminent ending of the world, after the ending of the present order, but its spiritual renewal. That belief in a coming new age, or ages, was common to the two most influential sources of reforming prophecy, Joachim of Fiore and Hildegard of …