| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Susan Juster. Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution. (Early American Studies.) Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2003. Pp. xi, 276. $39.95.
In this provocative study, Susan Juster makes an audacious and partly successful effort to treat religion within the context of an emerging eighteenth-century Anglo-American public sphere of print and rational discourse. In her telling, this historical public sphere was not the relentlessly secular construct of Jürgen Habermas's theory. It incorporated prophecy, which Juster defines broadly "from simple fortune-telling to formalized theories of Christ's return and the end of time," practices connected by the "conceit that biblical references and current events form a single providential history" (p. 4).	1
Juster argues that the years between 1765 and 1815—a "moment when no hard and fast lines were drawn around the 'spiritual' and the 'secular' ... when far-reaching changes in the way societies and governments were organized did not seem hopelessly utopian" (p. 271)—permitted prophets to frame their otherworldly messages for the "recessed corners of the bourgeois public sphere," where faith and reason could "jostle energetically for the soul of the believer" (p. 16). This pursuit split prophecy into two streams, a genteel millennialism pursued by clerics and scholars and a radical fringe led by figures who claimed direct divine revelation. The ultimate exclusion of the latter from the public sphere prompted figures like Joseph Smith to ignore that area completely, leading their marginalized followers into a wholesale rejection of bourgeois society.	. . .

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