Reviews

There have been many studies of Joachim di Fiore (c.1130-1202) over the last thirty years: general presentations of his life, assessments of his works, of his connection with the Cistercians and of his conception of the monastic life in the Order he founded, analyses of his hermeneutical method, apocalyptic views on the Church, investigations of his posthumous relations with the Spiritual Franciscans, reviews of his religious and secular posterity. The Order of Fiore, founded by him in the second half of the twelfth century, flourished in Southern Italy through the thirteenth century, and then began to shrink. What remained of it, notably the abbey of Fiore itself, was absorbed in the Cistercian Order in 1536. It is not as a founder, however, that Joachim has been remembered, but as a theologian who based his peculiar views of the future of the Church on a method of interpretation that he claimed to have received by inspiration. As a prophet the abbot had considerable success in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries among the Spiritual Franciscans. Most of the spiritualist movements that have agitated Christendom, before, during, and after the Reformation, have shown traces of Joachim's influence.