Skip to Main Content

Inspiration and Authority in the Middle Ages: Prophets and their Critics from Scholasticism to Humanism

Online ISBN:
9780191845956
Print ISBN:
9780198808244
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Inspiration and Authority in the Middle Ages: Prophets and their Critics from Scholasticism to Humanism

Brian FitzGerald
Brian FitzGerald

Lecturer, Program on History and Literature

Lecturer, Program on History and Literature, Harvard University
Find on
Published online:
19 October 2017
Published in print:
7 September 2017
Online ISBN:
9780191845956
Print ISBN:
9780198808244
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

Inspiration and Authority rethinks the role of prophecy in the Middle Ages by examining how professional theologians responded to new assertions of divine inspiration. The book argues that the task of defining prophetic authority became a crucial intellectual and cultural enterprise as university-trained theologians confronted prophetic claims from lay mystics, radical Franciscans, and other unprecedented visionaries. In the process, these theologians redescribed their own activities as prophetic by locating inspiration not in special predictions or ecstatic visions but in natural forms of understanding and in the daily work of ecclesiastical teaching and ministry. Instead of containing the spread of prophetic privilege, however, scholastic assessments of prophecy from Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas to Peter John Olivi and Nicholas Trevet opened space for claims of divine insight to proliferate beyond the control of theologians. The book ends with the examination of an early fourteenth-century debate in Padua between a Dominican theologian and the lay Italian humanist Albertino Mussato regarding the nature of poetry, prophecy, and sacred authority. This debate, the first of many similar ones over the course of that century, shows how the promotion of a more natural form of prophecy helped lay humanists on the cusp of the Renaissance stake their claims to prophetic inspiration on their intellectual powers and literary practices. These conflicts reveal medieval clerics, scholars, and reformers reshaping the contours of religious authority, the boundaries of sanctity and sacred texts, and the relationship of tradition to the new voices of the Late Middle Ages.

Contents
Close
This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

Close

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

View Article Abstract & Purchase Options

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Close