Most work on medieval attitudes to the future has concerned the eschatological, the millennial and the prophetic. It has resulted in many excellent studies which examine the lives and writings of people who warned of the coming of Antichrist, heralded the end of the world and the Last Judgement, or believed that they could see the working out of an all-embracing divine plan in human history. It takes but a moment’s reflection, however, to realise that this was only part of the way in which medieval people approached the future: in much more mundane ways they tried to predict, plan and provide for their futures. The contributors to this volume therefore share the common aim of bringing to the fore a fuller range of medieval beliefs and attitudes pertaining to the future. In particular, they seek to understand the relationships between these various beliefs and attitudes. This is an especially important task because, outside the work of a few brilliant scholars, prophetic and eschatological beliefs have often been treated as if they were too bizarre to be considered at the same time as other aspects of medieval culture. Thus, to give just one example, despite the universally acknowledged excellence of books about Joachim of Fiore by Marjorie Reeves and Bernard McGinn, books which place Joachim at the heart of intellectual and spiritual development in Western Europe, very few intellectual histories of the period give Joachim and his followers more than a passing mention.

The first section of the book is entitled ‘Thinking about the Future’, and the papers examine explicit references to and discussions of the future. Jeanix Claude Schmitt offers a broad overview of attitudes to the future, highlighting the significance of many issues addressed in subsequent papers. He discusses the way in which different beliefs about the future were reflected in the structure of language and the development of vocabulary, the different senses of the future which were expressed in charters and commercial contracts, and the variety of techniques which were used to foretell and control the future. Some of these techniques were condemned by ecclesiastical authorities, and Schmitt outlines the strategies which churchmen adopted in order to cultivate the eschatological and prophetic aspects of their faith, while rejecting ‘false prophets’.