Poverty, Heresy, and the Apocalypse: The Order of the Apostles and Social Change in Medieval Italy, 1260–1307 by Jerry B. Pierce (review)

Few medieval figures capture the imagination like Fra Dolcino, who assumed leadership of the unsanctioned order of the Apostles in 1300 after its founder, Gerardo Segarelli, was burned. Seven years later, many of the Apostles were slaughtered by a crusading army, and Dolcino himself was executed. Good work on Dolcino has been done by contemporary Italian scholars, but hitherto little has been written in English.

Pierce begins with an instructive historiographical overview of modern scholarship on the Apostles, with particular attention to (1) the repeated interpretation of Dolcino in political, revolutionary terms over the decades and (2) the American and English tendency to rely uncritically on prejudiced sources like Salimbene and Bernard Gui. Italian scholars like Raniero Orioli and Corrado Mornese, Pierce says, “have made significant contributions,” but “their efforts have been almost entirely overlooked by English-speaking historians” (p. 16). That charge is partly correct but ignores the extent to which Orioli’s work has now penetrated American scholarship so thoroughly that the current Wikipedia article on Dolcino relies heavily on him.

Italian scholarship on Dolcino is hardly unanimous. Pierce accepts Corrado Mornese’s argument (contra Orioli) that, in Dolcino’s battle with the crusade, peasants of the Valsesia area supported him. Mornese’s argument is fascinating but—like everything else involving Dolcino—debatable, and it would have been helpful if Pierce had explicitly examined it, since (as his bibliography shows) he is quite familiar with the Mornese/Buratti/Burat circle and their preoccupations. Also desirable would have been his evaluation of Orioli’s thoughts on a possible connection between Dolcino and the Visconti. And, since he relies heavily on Gui’s De secta pseudo-apostolorum and the anonymous Historia fratris Dulcini, a discussion of their provenance would have been of assistance of the reader. Is Gui really the author of the De secta? And whose interests is “anonymous” defending?

Dolcino’s apocalyptic program is important, as Pierce realizes. He compares Dolcino with Joachim of Fiore. This is standard, but recent work on apocalyptic thought in the century after Joachim has made it less promising to engage in point-by-point comparisons of Dolcino and Joachim as if there were nothing in between. So far only Gian Luca Potestà (yet another Italian) has begun to place Dolcino in his contemporary apocayptic/prophetic context.

If Pierce’s book can be said to have a major problem, it is that he gives himself too little space to do much of anything. He offers fifty-two pages of background covering social, economic, political, and ecclesiastical history from c. 1000 to the mid-thirteenth century, then finally turns to the Apostles but devotes only sixty-eight pages to them. What he cannot offer in those sixty-eight pages is what Orioli actually offers in the 325 pages of Venit perfidus heresiarcha—a subtle inquiry into who Dolcino was and what he stood for, one based on a close examination of all extant sources. Most of these sources are contestable, but when combined they point to some interesting hypotheses. And in the final analysis, hypotheses are the best we can do at present. Looming over any study of Dolcino is the disquieting fact that, of the sources available to us, almost nothing can be taken at face value.

Both the brevity of this book and its title now leave Pierce free to write what he is clearly capable of producing: a book specifically on Dolcino that combines the complexity and scholarly acumen of Orioli with the more recent insights of Mornese, Potestà, and other authors.