The High Medieval Era · 1202-1300 · Calabria, then Franciscan circles
Joachimite Current
Part of another tradition's story
This group's story is told as part of another tradition here, rather than as its own entry.
About This Movement
Joachim of Fiore was a Calabrian abbot who read history as a pattern with a shape: three ages, of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the third still to come and not far off. He died in 1202, and the current that carried his reading afterwards was never an order or a church. It was a way of reading the Bible and the calendar together, and it spread especially among Franciscans, who found in it a description of their own movement. In 1254 a young friar published an Introduction to the Eternal Gospel that made the claim explicit and scandalous, and it was condemned. The current then fixed on 1260 as the year the new age would open. The year came and went. Some let it go, and some carried the expectation on into the bitter Franciscan quarrel over poverty, where it did most of its later work.
Sources
- Joachim of Fiore, selections in Bernard McGinn, Apocalyptic Spirituality (Classics of Western Spirituality, 1979) (primary) — Joachim's letters and key texts plus Spiritual-Franciscan material - both ends of the current in one translated volume, with Reeves's preface.
- Joachim of Fiore, major works: Liber de Concordia, Expositio in Apocalypsim, Psalterium decem chordarum (primary) — The authentic baseline against which the pseudo-corpus is measured. Latin text; critical editions exist (MGH), and E. R. Daniel produced a partial translation of the Concordia, but no complete English translation exists.
- The pseudo-Joachimite corpus (Super Hieremiam, Super Esaiam, the Vaticinia) (primary) — The texts that actually carried the current after c. 1240, written by others under Joachim's name. Latin only; no English translation.
- Salimbene de Adam, Chronicle (trans. Baird, Baglivi & Kane, MRTS, 1986) (primary) — An ex-Joachimite friar's first-person memoir: expectation caught, shared in friaries, pinned to Frederick II, dropped when 1260 passed - communally carried expectation observed from inside; includes the 1254 Eternal Evangel scandal (Gerard of Borgo San Donnino) and the hostile commission record known as the Protocol of Anagni. The current rested on communal expectation more than on Joachim's own person, within Franciscan circles.
- Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism (Clarendon, 1969) (secondary) — The standard study, built on the distinction between Joachim himself and the broader Joachimist movement his ideas inspired. Reeves and Salimbene both document real episodes of communal expectation inside Franciscan circles, not just an individual reading program.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 4 (reference) — See also ch. 3 (Kienzle) for the Franciscan context this current grew within.