In his introduction to the collection of essays presented in this volume, the editor, Michael Ryan, identifies his target audience as ‘students, particularly at the undergraduate and initial graduate levels, who are beginning their initial forays into the field’ (p. 4). This ‘field’ is the history and scholarship of apocalypticism in premodern Europe, defined in a footnote as the ‘large arc of time that covers the medieval and early modern periods of European history’ (p. 2 n. 4) – between, in other words, the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Enlightenment. Accordingly, the majority of contributions consist of general introductions to a particular topic or surveys of the state of the field at present.

The collection is divided into two sections. Part i concentrates on social and cultural aspects of apocalyptic thought during the premodern period as well as larger methodological issues surrounding the discipline, while part ii focuses on specific geographical case studies. Of course, any attempt artificially to impose such a tidy division upon the diverse essays that make up this collection is bound to meet with limited success at best. Nevertheless, the majority of the essays do fit comfortably within these broad parameters, and those which perhaps do not may be forgiven their nonconformity given the value of their contributions.

Fittingly, the collection begins with a contribution by one of the foremost experts in medieval apocalypticism, Richard Emmerson's ‘Medieval illustrated apocalypse manuscripts'. Emmerson is clearly at home in this research guide to the four broad types of apocalyptic manuscripts, and helpfully includes links to digitised forms of these texts in several footnotes. Natalie Latteri's ‘Jewish apocalypticism: an historiography’, on the other hand, discusses trends in the modern academic portrayal of Jewish apocalypticism during the medieval period. While the essay's assumption of familiarity with medieval Jewish apocalyptic thought limits its applicability to non-specialists in the field, I appreciated Latteri's call for further research into this little-explored corner of apocalyptic belief.

Kevin Poole's ‘The Western apocalypse commentary tradition’ is a basic summary and evaluation of eight influential Latin commentaries on the book of Revelation from the dawn of the Constantinian era to the early eighth century, from Victorinus to Beatus of Liébana. Poole's introduction to these authors and their texts is informative and clear, marred only by, in my opinion, insufficient attention to the ideas and influence of Tyconius, which limits the effectiveness of his later claims about the supposedly unique contributions of later writers such as Caesarius and Bede.

Part i concludes with two essays which are more conceptual in nature. László Hubbes argues that the medieval world was dominated by apocalyptic expectation to a degree unmatched in late antiquity (a cultural paradigm he refers to as ‘the apocalypticum’) in his contribution, ‘Apocalyptic as a new mental paradigm of the Middle Ages', while Roland Betancourt's ‘Prolepsis and anticipation: the apocalyptic futurity of the now, East and West’ is an examination of the different ways in which the Latin and Greek apocalyptic traditions diverged in their conception of eschatology. Betancourt argues that while Latin theology emphasised the anticipatory aspect of the apocalypse, the Byzantine imperial tradition pulled the apocalyptic future into a perpetually-manifest present (the ‘proleptic’), a point which he illustrates through careful analysis of the Italo-Byzantine mosaic of the Last Judgment at the church of Santa Maria Assunta in Torcello.

For the most part, part ii leaves behind the pursuit of overarching methodological approaches in favour of specific case studies, of which the first, Ernst Hintz's ‘Muspilli: Old High German judgment day: judicial practice and salvation in the ninth century’, is a detailed description of the anonymous ninth-century apocalyptic poem and its attempt to influence political reform in the Carolingian court. Hiram Kümper, on the other hand, considers a much wider swathe of medieval primary sources in ‘Apocalyptic thought in medieval German historiography: Otto of Freising and beyond’. As per the title, Kümper's article concentrates on apocalyptic elements within town and world chronicles within the Holy Roman Empire, from Otto of Freising's 1157 Chronica sive historica de duabus civitatis to Sebastian Franck's Chronica, Zeitbüch vnnd Geschichtbibell, published in 1531. Matthias Riedl's ‘Apocalyptic violence and revolutionary action: Thomas Müntzer's Sermon to the princes' is, in my opinion, one of the breakout articles of this collection, a tightly-argued essay with a clear compelling thesis: that Thomas Müntzer's activist, violent apocalypticism represents a definite shift from the more deterministic eschatology of previous generations.

We then move away from German apocalypticism with two essays which focus on the British Isles. Robert Boenig's ‘The apocalypse in medieval England’ is an excellent introduction to literary portrayals of the end of the world in Anglo-Saxon and Norman literature (despite a noticeable gap in primary sources between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries), and his basic observation, that English apocalypticism generally supported rather than subverted the dominant culture, is well taken. Katherine Olson's ‘“Earth and sky will be Ablaze”: the apocalypse, hell, and judgment in pre-modern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany’ dovetails well with Boenig's article with its examination of Celtic apocalyptic traditions. I was particularly fascinated by Olson's discussion of the uniquely Irish apocalyptic tradition in which, according to legend, Ireland's national guilt for the death of John the Baptist at the hands of Mog Ruith would result in special retribution at the end of the world.

The collection wraps up with Thomas Long's ‘Revising the Revelation: early modern appropriations of medieval apocalypticism’, a fitting conclusion which examines the ways in which early modern appropriations of the apocalypse adapted and diverged from the medieval traditions upon which they were based. My personal impression is that while A companion to the premodern apocalypse is at best uneven in its stated purpose of serving as a reference guide for novices, most of the essays contained within this collection are of high quality and deeply useful for scholars who, already familiar with the general contours of medieval and early modern apocalypticism, wish to branch out into more specific aspects of this perennially-intriguing discipline.