The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism

Marjorie Reeves was a historian of medieval prophetic and apocalyptic thought, and this Clarendon Press book is her academic monograph on the influence of Joachim of Fiore's prophetic theology, Joachimism, across the later Middle Ages. Its strength is that it remains a standard scholarly account of how one twelfth century abbot's speculative reading of history as a coming Age of the Spirit spread and mutated across later medieval religious and political movements, grounded in extensive manuscript research. Its limit is its age and scope, published in 1969, some of its specific readings have been refined by later medieval scholarship, and it concentrates on the tradition's spread rather than on Joachim's own theology in isolation, so a claim about Joachim's original teaching itself is better checked against a source focused on his own texts.