In premodern Europe, prophecy was both an incisive weapon in the struggle for power and a medium to convey information. In this article, I examine the circulation in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Florence of a prophetic dispatch: the so-called Toledo Letter, an old prophecy updated several times in late medieval Europe. The five different versions of the letter I have located in Florence are an ideal case study in the reception of prophecies as texts which frame the ongoing natural and political disasters in a broader religious narrative, place them in a temporality in which past and future overlap, and encourage the readers to believe in what is announced.
News from the Future. Letters, Prophecies and the Public Sphere in Late Medieval Florence / Lodone, Michele. - In: STUDI MEDIEVALI. - ISSN 0391-8467. - 64:2(2023), pp. 585-620.
News from the Future. Letters, Prophecies and the Public Sphere in Late Medieval Florence
Michele Lodone
2023
Abstract
In premodern Europe, prophecy was both an incisive weapon in the struggle for power and a medium to convey information. In this article, I examine the circulation in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Florence of a prophetic dispatch: the so-called Toledo Letter, an old prophecy updated several times in late medieval Europe. The five different versions of the letter I have located in Florence are an ideal case study in the reception of prophecies as texts which frame the ongoing natural and political disasters in a broader religious narrative, place them in a temporality in which past and future overlap, and encourage the readers to believe in what is announced.File | Dimensione | Formato | |
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