Profeti e profetismi: Escatologia, millenarismo e utopia. Edited by Andre Vauchez. [Conifere, Vol. 7.] (Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane. 2014. Pp. 484. euro49,00 paperback. ISBN 978-88-10-56008-2.)Although perhaps not as fashionable as they were around the turn of the last the intertwined subjects of prophecy, eschatology, and apocalypticism remain a vital part of scholarship on the Western tradition, ranging from antiquity through the Middle Ages and into the modern (or even postmodern) era. The pursuit of the millennium, to speak, harkening back to Norman Cohn's groundtions breaking work on the problem of millenarianism and its revolutionar)' potentialities, continues among historians, sociologists, political scientists and others. Far from being marginal, prophetic voices, apocalyptic predictions, and eschatological speculations provide a fascinating opportunity to interrogate all sorts of texts, events, and figures that relate to a wide range of political, intellectual, and social issues, some conservative and others subversive, framed in religious but also secularized forms of theorizing about the future.This volume of essays edited by Andre Vauchez (an Italian translation of the original publication, Prophetes et prophetisme [Paris, 2012]) makes for a welcome addition to the ongoing dialogue about what Vauchez calls the three principal forms of (eschatology, millenarianism, and utopianism), viewed here as cultural constructs, with a strong symbolic character, that need to be taken seriously since they illustrate the role played by the imagination in human society (p. 17). The collection includes contributions by Jean-Robert Armogathe, Sylvie Barnat, Jean-Pierre Bastian, Philippe Boutry, Pierre Gibert, Balerio Petrarca, and Isabelle Richet. These studies designedly stretch across the entirety of Western apocalyptic discourse from the Bible to the late-twentieth century. They also widen the geographic scope of their inquiry into various iterations of prophecy and millenarianism, including chapters on Africa, Latin America, and North America (meaning, in effect, the United States).Scholars conversant in the premodern apocalyptic tradition will encounter many familiar texts and names in this collection, starting with the Christian roots of prophecy and messianic thought in the Hebrew tradition to the highly influential patristic thinker Augustine of Hippo (whose stultifying effect on millennial speculation was considerable, albeit not absolute), followed by medieval monastic authors including Hildegard of Bingen and Joachim of Fiore, and Reformation-era firebrands like Thomas Muntzer (along with, inevitably, Michel de Notre Dame, better known as Nostradamus). …