Joachim of Fiore proclaimed a philosophy of history which exercised a powerful influence in succeeding centuries. This book traces the influence of his prophecies concerning a Third Age of the Spirit to come, as later expressed in the themes of New Spiritual Men, Last World Emperor, Angelic Pope, and Renovatio Mundi. It shows that these ideas were not only the mainspring of various heterodox groups, but also engaged the attention of certain church leaders, university scholars, Renaissance thinkers, Protestant theologians, and political rulers down to the seventeenth century.

A study of the prophetic tradition in medieval England brings out its influence on contemporary politics and the contemporary elite.

Joachim of Fiore has been described as the most singular and fascinating figure of mediaeval Christendom. This title explores his unique understanding of history and looks at the powerful influence of his ideas.

The essays here collect the author's further researches since the publication of her pathbreaking Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages in 1969. In part stimulated by responses to the book, they also show the extent to which the field then opened up has now expanded. In the last forty years a cultural shift in the meaning of 'history' has brought to the forefront an interest in how people have charted their future by the signs given in their historical heritage. Both pessimistic and optimistic readings of history meet in medieval Western Europe and colour the thought, art, even the politics of the Renaissance. In particular, the powerful vision of Joachim of Fiore activated a reading of history which culminates in a flowering of a 'third age'. These essays attempt to portray some of the strange and moving shapes which thronged the imagination as men and women looked to their prophetic future.

In the middle of the fourteenth century, the Franciscan friar John of Rupescissa sent a dramatic warning to his followers: the last days were coming; the apocalypse was near. Deemed insane by the Christian church, Rupescissa had spent more than a decade confined to prisons in one case wrapped in chains and locked under a staircase yet ill treatment could not silence the friar's apocalyptic message. Religious figures who preached the end times were hardly rare in the late Middle Ages, but Rupescissa's teachings were unique. He claimed that knowledge of the natural world, and alchemy in particular, could act as a defense against the plagues and wars of the last days. His melding of apocalyptic prophecy and quasi-scientific inquiry gave rise to a new genre of alchemical writing and a novel cosmology of heaven and earth. Most important, the friar's research represented a remarkable convergence between science and religion. In order to understand scientific knowledge today, Leah DeVun asks that we revisit Rupescissa's life and the critical events of his age the Black Death, the Hundred Years' War, the Avignon Papacy through his eyes. Rupescissa treated alchemy as medicine (his work was the conceptual forerunner of pharmacology) and represented the emerging technologies and views that sought to combat famine, plague, religious persecution, and war. The advances he pioneered, along with the exciting strides made by his contemporaries, shed critical light on later developments in medicine, pharmacology, and chemistry.

While poets have traditionally inhabited cultural margins, prophets have brought poetic language to the center of cultural debate, not foretelling the future so much as diagnosing the present. This exciting collection of nine essays examines the range of social and political implications that inflects poetic discourse, from the Old English and Latin texts of the Anglo-Saxon world to the Scotland and England of the Renaissance. Whether saints' lives, Germanic heroic epics, chronicles, or satiric poems, the works discussed in this book retain their verbal power, if not their political influence, into our own time.

Chaucerian scholarship has long been intrigued by the nature and consequences of Chaucer’s exposure to Italian culture during his professional visits to Italy in the 1370s. In this volume, leading scholars take a new and more holistic view of Chaucer’s engagement with Italian cultural practice, moving beyond the traditional ‘sources and analogues’ approach to reveal the varied strands of Italian literature, art, politics and intellectual life that permeate Chaucer’s work. Each chapter examines from different angles links between Chaucerian texts and Italian intellectual models, including poetics, chorography, visual art, classicism, diplomacy and prophecy. Echoes of Petrarch, Dante and Boccaccio reverberate throughout the book, across a rich and diverse landscape of Italian cultural legacies. Together, the chapters cover a wide range of theory and reference, while sharing a united understanding of the rich impact of Italian culture on Chaucer’s narrative art.

This essay collection studies the Apocalypse and the end of the world, as these themes occupied the minds of biblical scholars, theologians, and ordinary people in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Early Modernity. It opens with an innovative series of studies on “Gendering the Apocalypse,” devoted to the texts and contexts of the apocalyptic through the lens of gender. A second section of essays studies the more traditional problem of “Apocalyptic Theory and Exegesis,” with a focus on authors such as Augustine of Hippo and Joachim of Fiore. A final series of essays extends the thematic scope to “The Eschaton in Political, Liturgical, and Literary Contexts.” In these essays, scholars of history, theology, and literature create a dialogue that considers how fear of the end of the world, among the most pervasive emotions in human experience, underlies a great part of Western cultural production.

This study examines expectations of imminent judgment that energized reform movements in Late Medieval and Reformation Europe. It probes the apocalyptic vision of the Lollards, followers of the Oxford professor John Wycliff (1384). The Lollards repudiated the medieval church and established conventicles despite officially sanctioned prosecution. While exploring the full spectrum of late medieval apocalypticism, this work focuses on the diverse range of Wycliffite literature, political and religious treatises, sermons, biblical commentaries, including trial records, to reveal a dynamic strain of apocalyptic discourse. It shows that sixteenth-century English apocalypticism was fed by vibrant, indigenous Wycliffite well springs. The rhetoric of Lollard apocalypticism is analyzed and its effect on carriers and audiences is investigated, illuminating the rise of evil in church and society as perceived by the Lollards and their radical reform program.