The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (review)

136 Reviews Dotson is to be commended for an excellent translation accompanied by useful notes and appendices: a gazeteer, and two notes on money and on Venetian weights and measures in the Zibaldone. John H. Pryor Department of History University of Sydney Emmerson, Richard K. and Bernard McGinn, eds., The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1992; cloth and paper; pp. xiii, 428; 57 illustrations; R.R.P. US$54.95 (cloth), $21.95 (paper). This collection is a real feast. After McGinn's introduction on 'John's Apocalypse and the apocalyptic mentality', three sections offer a wide variety of contributions on 'The Apocalypse in medieval thought', 'The Apocalypse in medieval art', and "The Apocalypse in medieval culture'. Space precludes comment on all of the contributions. What follows is limited to comments on some selected articles. Fhst it should be quite clear, as P. FredrUcsen points out in 'Tychonius and Augustine on the Apocalypse', that Tychonius and Augustine set the pattern for the interpretation of the Book of Revelation, from whose strictures it was Reviews 137 impossible to break open until Joachim of Fiore. The stress on the ecclesiological 'reading' rather than the 'mUlennarian' one was powerfully strengthened by Primasius and commentaries following him, such as that of Beatus of Liehana. It was only with Joachim that the Apocalypse recovered that 'apocalyptic' reading which Tychonius and Augustine set out to expunge. As R. E. Lerner points out in 'The medieval return to the thousand-year sabbath': 'Joachim's treatment of the future was literally and figuratively epoch making' (p. 57). E. Randolph Daniel argues in 'Joachim of Fiore: patterns of history in the Apocalypse', that the Apocalypse for Joachim was the wheel within the wheel, the inner key to the meaning of the general history of the historical books of the Old Testament . . . Understood in Joachim's terms, the Apocalypse was not an addendum to the N e w Testament, canonized but kept apart from the rest. O n the contrary, it was the culmination and summary of the entire course of history. Joachim broke decisively with the TychonianAugustinian tradition of interpreting the Apocalypse allegorically and instead interpreted it historically, (p. 87) What enabled Joachim to do so was the pattern of concordances between the Old and the N e wtestaments,not in afiguralor allegorical sense that the Old foreshadowed the N e w and the N e w fulfilled the Old, but that the patterns of generations based on the Old corresponded to those in the New. According to Daniel, 'Joachim's concordia was a new notion. John of Patmos had no such scheme in mind, and no such concept can be found in earlier commentaries' (pp. 87-88). The Mendicant readings of the Apocalypse differed widely, as was to be expected after the condemnation of the Joachimite approach, but the Franciscans had considerably more difficulty in staying clear of it than the Dominicans. As D . Burr claims in 'Mendicant readings of the Apocalypse', although the general tendency in both orders was to edge away from an apocalyptic interpretation of the mendicant phenomenon (Olivi was a notable exception, but we know his posthumous fate), that movement cost the Franciscans substantially more effort. The Scandal of the Eternal Gospel and subsequent controversy with the Spiritual Franciscans gave Minorite scholars a lively sense of the dangers lurking in the apocalyptic speculation; yet sermons and collationes on Francis as angel of the sixth seal continued to be preached in Franciscan houses, as the Bonaventuran legacy suggested they must. (p. 102) 138 Reviews This is the essence of the matter, for Francis and his stigmata make sense only as a messenger of renovatio, while Dominic's role can be safely accommodated within the existing ecclesiology of the Church. The introduction to the third section by R. K. Emmerson, 'The Apocalypses in medieval culture', is particularly useful and stimulating, with its discussion of the imagery derived from the Apocalypse, such as that of 'eating the book*, on which Jesse Gelhich has written a whole study. In 'Dante and the Apocalypse', R. B. Herzman takes the position that the emphasis on the 'Hound' [il veltro], on '515* [DVX, i.e...