Between Prophecy and Apocalypse: The Burden of Sacred Time and the Making of History in Early Medieval Europe. By MatthewGabriele. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2024. viii + 145 pp. $45. ISBN 9780199642557.

This short book comprises three case studies intended to illustrate the author's contention that we are best served by adopting an approach towards the study of the past that emphasizes contingency, the complexity of human agency, and an appreciation of the horizon of expectations envisaged by historical actors.In the introduction Gabriele argues that the tenth and eleventh centuries have been unfairly characterized as an era of decline and chaos and suggests that our understanding of the period has been warped by teleological and presentist approaches to history.There is little to argue with here, although the fact that he presents Jules Michelet (1798-1874) and George Lincoln Burr (1857Burr ( -1938) ) as emblematic of the presentist approach, despite neither author influencing how modern historians conceive of this period in any significant way, suggests the possibility that a straw man is being constructed.Gabriele writes that 'the tenth and eleventh centuries were not . . .pale shadows of nineteenth-century modernity, nor were they its antithesis.They were, and have always been, their own thing.'Surely, no scholar writing today disagrees.He assigns names to what he considers two poles of thinking about the past: 'Apocalypse' stands for writing about history from the privileged position of the future, with the attendant risks of teleology and presentism.'Prophecy', by contrast, represents looking forward: 'the same events, anticipated but not yet seen'.Gabriele posits something called 'Instrumental History' as a virtuous mean between these extremes.Having been introduced, these concepts mostly disappear for the rest of the book.In Chapter 1 Gabriele provides a selective history of late antique biblical exegesis to argue (sensibly) that interpretation of the Bible was always grounded in the needs of the present.Whereas both the past and future were predetermined by scripture, the present represented a blank space, a kind of gap in sacred history.Gabriele advances a theory of 'Augustinian Atemporality', according to Early Medieval Europe