As Brian FitzGerald observes, “Prophecy's place as a defining feature of the religious culture of the Latin Middle Ages has been clear for some time” (1). In this book he explores what prophecy might have meant in addition to its usual sense of eschatological prediction.
The six chapters of the book are arranged chronologically. The first, “Hugh of St. Victor and the Prophetic Contemplation of History,” discusses the ways in which prophetic insight could be construed in terms of the study of history and its purposes, and further cultivated by the examination of the natural world and its workings. The next chapter, “The Scholastic Exegesis of Prophecy,” examines twelfth-century commentaries on the Psalms, and how Gilbert of Poitiers and Peter Lombard saw in the psalter the prophetic hand of Ezra the scribe, who had rearranged the Psalms in achronological sequence in order to demonstrate Christian theological truths. Here prophecy was extended to the exposition of God's verities in Scripture, an exegetical move that had biblical authority in the prophetic status of King David, the traditional author of the Psalms.
In chapter 3, “Polemic, Preaching, and Early Dominican Assessments of Prophetic Authority,” FitzGerald explores the debates among Dominicans, notably Peter the Venerable, Hugh of St. Cher, and Albert the Great, about the category of prophecy and the limits of prophetic authority. By the end of the twelfth century, these debates were increasingly backlit by the apocalyptic writings of Joachim of Fiore and others, which sought to disclose the purpose of history and its end. In “Mendicant Conflict over Prophecy: Thomas Aquinas and Peter John Olivi,” FitzGerald outlines their clashing interpretations of the meaning of prophecy. The Dominican Aquinas downplayed its enthusiastic, predictive, and otherworldly aspects while accentuating its intellectual dimensions and homiletic and ethical functions. The Franciscan Olivi, by contrast, regarded prophecy more in step with the Joachimite tradition, which stressed the historical exegesis of Scripture and its chief purpose of eschatological prediction.
In chapter 5, “Nicholas Trevet and the Consolation of Prophecy,” FitzGerald explains how the Dominican Trevet's writings continued the trend away from the mystical, ecstatic, and visionary understanding of prophecy towards a view that stressed contemplation and inspiration. In the book's final chapter, “Albertino Mussato and Humanist Prophecy,” FitzGerald shifts his gaze from theologians and the university setting to the humanist Paduan poet Mussato. Responding to the Dominican Giovannino of Mantua, who “rejected the truth-value of poetic language in general” (204), Mussina defended poetry as a form of prophecy and took a page from Aquinas's own methods, reaching back to classical authorities such as Aristotle for justification.
The book closes with a brief but informative conclusion, which is followed by an appendix that reproduces Augustine's and Aquinas's “categories of visions and prophecies,” a list of manuscripts (whether consulted or cited is unclear), bibliographies of primary works and secondary sources, and a general index.
This book is not about prophecy “in the Middle Ages,” despite what its title states and opening sentence implies. It covers a period of only two hundred years, from the early twelfth to the early fourteenth centuries. Nor does it excavate the meaning of prophecy among all groups, circles, and social strata during these two centuries. FitzGerald centers his discussion on a handful of theologians and other leading intellectuals from Western Europe, mainly Dominicans, mostly in or around universities. Although his observations and conclusions are illuminating, the narrow parameters of the research to some degree determine the book's results.
Even so, scholars of the Renaissance have much to learn from this book. The fourteenth and fifteen centuries witnessed the expansion of prophecy (better understood as apocalyptic speculation) along avenues ranging from poetry to astrology to alchemy to the exploration of the natural world to the rational exertion of the intellect. FitzGerald's book unpacks the embryonic stages of this process, with its sixth chapter, on Mussato and the prophetic dimensions of poetry, serving a bridge of sorts across the eras.
The expansion of prophecy during these centuries was also an extension of authority. Then as now, prophets claim unmediated access to Heaven and authoritative status as a revelatory conduit for divine information that bypasses temporal authorities and their theological and institutional firewalls. It is a curious implication of FitzGerald's study that the Scholastics who propelled ideas of prophecy down fresh paths in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries also sought, in part, to clamp down on the wild strains represented by Joachimite prophecy, yet a century or two later the same paths, now widened and hardened by more frequent use, permitted the humanistic inflation of the sources and nature of knowledge that often challenged traditional authority.
This new book contributes significantly to our understanding of the meanings and uses of prophecy among the stakeholder intelligentsia of Western Europe during late Middle Ages. Pigeonholing prophecy as either predictive or not is a heuristic device, and one that is sometimes misused, but in FitzGerald's sure hands it is used to illuminate major trends of the era. No study of this era or the influence of these trends on the development of humanism can ignore this book.
