Richard Allen Landes

Richard Landes is a professor of history at Boston University. His work focuses on the role of religion in shaping and transforming the relationships between elites and commoners in various cultures. He has coined the expression "demotic religiosity," an orientation that prizes 1) equality before the law, 2) dignity of manual labor, 3) access to sacred texts and divinity for all believers, and 4) a prizing of moral integrity over social honor. Trained as a medievalist, his early work focused on the period around 1000 CE, a moment, in his opinion, of both cultural mutation (origins of the modern West), and intense apocalyptic and millennial expectations. His publications in medieval history include: The Apocalyptic Year 1000: Studies in the Mutation of European Culture, ed. R. Landes, Andrew Gow, and D. Van Meter (Oxford University Press, 2003); Relics, Apocalypse, and the Deceits of History: Ademar of Chabannes (989-1034) (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France around the Year 1000, ed. Thomas Head and Richard Landes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992) From 1995-2004, he directed the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University which held annual conferences and published an online journal, Journal of Millennial Studies. This involvement refocused his work on millennialism the world over and in different time periods, and has resulted in the Encyclopedia of Millennialism and Millennial Movements, (Berkshire Reference Works; Routledge, NY, 2000); Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience (Oxford U. Press, 2011), and The Paranoid Apocalypse: A Hundred-Year Retrospective on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (NYU Press, 2011). His work on the apocalyptic currents that built up during the approach to 2000 has led him to focus on Global Jihad as a) an apocalyptic millennial movement; and b) a new religious movement whose relationship to the internet may parallel that of Protestantism to printing. At the same time, studying the dynamics of millennialism has turned his attention to the role of communications technology in shaping a culture, and on the controversial issue of “honor-shame” cultures and their relationship to modernity. He offers courses on “Communications Revolutions from Language to Cyberspace,” “Honor-shame culture Middle Ages, Middle East,” and is preparing a course in the Biblical origins of the democracy. In 2011, he is a fellow at the International Consortium on Research in the Humanities at Alexander University, Erlangen, Germany. There he is working on the study with which his medieval work first began, the history of the “sabbatical millennium” with its expectation of the messianic kingdom in the year 6000 from the creation of the world: While God Tarried: Demotic Millennialism from Jesus to the Peace of God, 33-1033.