A Beautiful Ending

What does it mean to live near the end of time and await the world's rebirth, as generations of Jews, Christians and Muslims did? A Beautiful Ending is a masterful synthesis of the prognostications of faith, knowledge, and politics on a global stage. Martin's book illuminates one of the enduring themes that shaped the medieval and early modern world. -Paula E. Findlen, Stanford University In his elegantly braided analysis of the apocalyptic imagination among Christian, Muslim, and Jewish thinkers, John Jeffries Martin recasts the world-making events of the late medieval and early modern periods. A Beautiful Ending is a beautiful book. -Alan Mikhail, author of God's Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World Martin's masterful and wide-ranging study places ideas about the end of the world in their historical context, demonstrating how the apocalyptic imagination allowed historical actors to confront difficult and often frightening circumstances. Their experiences inform our own contemporary historical moment. -Elizabeth Horodowich, New Mexico State University A sweeping history of early modern apocalyptic and millenarian thought among Christians, Muslims, and Jews, when the end of history brought expectations of a golden age of peace. Martin provides a powerful history of the hopes and horrors produced by these apocalyptic fantasies with an eye to their continuity into our own times. Few books make early modern history more relevant to the present. -Stuart Schwartz, Yale University In his richly detailed new book, John Jeffries Martin advances the striking hypothesis that apocalyptic thinking not only did not go away with the advent of modernity; it was one of the key forces that gave us our modern world. If he's right, much of what we thought we knew bears rethinking. -Benjamin M. Friedman, author of Religion and the Rise of Capitalism