Gian Luca Potestà (Milan)
The Apocalypse of Fra Dolcino: Between History and Myth
Dolcino has long been considered the precursor of the peasant and
proletariat revolts of the centuries that follow, a champion of the
lower classes in their ambitions for freedom, an ante litteram theorist
of guerilla war. More recent research has slowly reconfigured and
demythologized these aspects of his image. Such research has
concentrated predominantly on the acts of the trials against his
companions and followers, which are important above all for determining
the extent and organizational capacities of his movement throughout the
first decades of the fourteenth century. Some depositions of those
interrogated offer precious bits of information on Dolcino and reveal a
fundamental component of his charisma: his apocalyptic and prophetic
figure. Dolcino attributed his convictions to celestial visions and
claimed a divine calling to his mission: that of announcing and
propitiating an imminent reform of the Church beginning from the top.
Portions of the announcement and its effects can be understood thanks
to the study of the texts of the circular letters Dolcino sent to his
followers. These show that Dolcino was not simply an imitator of the
pauperista movement of the “Apostoli” of Gerardo Segarelli. His
apocalyptic conceptions and his prophetic and messianistic
selfconsciousness reveal dependencies and links in another direction:
along with other people and environments, Dolcino shares that febrile
expectation of change fed by the propogandistic Joachist texts
(relatively unknown and in part still inedited), produced and
circulated between the end of the thirteenth century and the beginning
of the fourteenth century concerning the destiny of the papacy in end
times.
