Brian FitzGerald. Inspiration and Authority in the Middle Ages

Since at least the 1930s, when Marjorie Reeves brought Joachim of Fiore squarely into English-language scholarship, the flowering of prophecy in medieval Latin Christianity has fascinated contemporary scholars. In Inspiration and Authority in the Middle Ages: Prophets and Their Critics from Scholasticism to Humanism, Brian FitzGerald proposes to expand the high medieval category of “prophecy” well beyond Joachim and his intellectual heirs. Like the overlapping circles of Joachim’s three ages of the world (corresponding, of course, to the three persons of the Trinity), FitzGerald offers intersecting narratives that locate common prophetic ground among scriptural commentaries, scholastic treatises, and humanistic poetics. His monograph argues convincingly for a broader and not necessarily apocalyptic understanding of prophecy that emerges between the twelfth and the early fourteenth centuries—primarily in France, England, and Italy—and is mostly subsumed into larger trends of humanistic discourse by the end of that period, as the language of prophecy increasingly becomes the province of visionary mystics.

Aesthetics · Art · Christianity · Humanism · Literature · Middle Ages · Mysticism · Period (music) · Poetics · Poetry · Scholarship · Scholasticism · Theology · Classics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Religious studies · Religious Tourism and Spaces