| Summary: | The study of the Franciscan dissident tradition – the tradition of the ‘Spirituals’ and of the Fraticelli – allows a better understanding of some issues at the core of Italian religious history between the 15th and the 16th century. These included the formation of the Papal States, with its ideological and material implications, and the endless ideals of Christian poverty, as well as the forceful eschatological expectations and the dilemma of whether to save obedience to the ecclesiatical authority or to inner illumination. Keeping this first matter as a background topic, my research focuses on the relationship between prophetism, ecclesiology and spiritual discernment.What was the role of the Fransciscan dissidence' tradition in late-medieval prophetism? The first part of the dissertation is going to focus on the fortune of one of this tradition's foundation texts (San Francis's prophecy on the future tribulations of the Order of Friars Minor and the Church), by displaying its specific eschatological charge - influenced by Christ's apocaliptic speech in Matthew 24 - and its consequent ecclesiological value. The certainly of the imminence of the Final Judgement actually intertwines with the ineluctable matter of obedience to an unworthy authority and an ecclesiastical hierarchy that has deviated from its duty. However, this sort of vademecum of the Franciscan dissident tradition does not invite to rebellion, but rather to caution and discernment of spirits.Such a picture explains the continuity of the debate on revelations and discretio spirituum between the end of the 13th century, when Olivi and many other Fransciscan authors bound to the dissident party laid its basis, and the early 16th century. In the second and third part of the dissertation, I am going to analyse two illustrative case studies that exhibit the two different outcomes of this same apocaliptic tradition: that of the lay priest Gabriele Biondo, son of the humanist Biondo Flavio, and that of the Friar Minor Francesco da Montepulciano
|
|---|
