Joachim di Fiore, pseudo
Scriptum super Hieremiam … — Venice 1516
4.500 €Scriptum super Hieremiam Prophetam […] — [Colophon:] Impressum Venetijs per Lazarum de Soardis. 1516. Die. 12. Junij. [Venice, Soardi, 12 June 1516].
First edition.
4to (207 x 154 mm). a2 b,c4 d8 e,f4 g8 h4 i8 k,l4 m6 n4: (4), 62 leaves. Woodcut of Joachim in his studio. Modern vellum with the old vellum laid down. – ustc 800343; Edit16 32004. Not in Adams.
¶ Authorship: „For six centuries until the mid-ninetenth century, the Super Hieremiam was arguably Joachim’s most famous and most oft-cited work. When the Venetian editors began to edit Joachim’s works in the early 1500s, they chose to publish the Super Hieremiam twice (1516 and 1527), and it was published a third time in Cologne in 1577; Joachim’s three major works were printed only once. When the Cistercian Gregory de Lauro set out in the mid-1600s to defend the tarnished reputation of the Abbot, a chief argument was the prophetic accuracy of the Super Hieremiam – that is, Joachim’s authorship was taken for granted.“ (Moynihan 119) In 1859 Karl Friedrich, a student of D. Baur, published an essay which argued that Super Hieremiam could not be written by Joachim. This became a general consensus. From then on the question of authorship remains open.
As for authorship, there are now two main schools: for one the text was made by Franciscan spirituals, for the other by southern Italian Florensian monks. R. Moynihan’s solution of the riddle, based on studies of manuscripts, is: „both the Franciscans and the Florensians, at different times [in the thirteenth century, JD], hand a hand in composing Super Hieremiam.“ (Moynihan 128)
Another quotation, this from Julia Eva Wannenmacher: „The Peudo-Joachite Commentary, “Super Ieremiam” is Joachim of Fiore’s most influential as well as his most neglected work. For centuries, everybody believed it to be Joachim’s – and maybe only because the “Super Ieremiam” was so highly popular did Joachim’s authentic writings survive, together with the pseudepigraphic ones. Among the variety of texts which are linked with the name of Joachim of Fiore, the “Super Ieremiam” plays an eminent role. It is unique not only in the sense that none of the pseudepigraphic works have been transmitted in closer relation to the authentic works – the word here is intertextuality –, that none of Joachim’s works, either authentic or pseudeopigraphical, or any other of Joachim’s or Joachite text has been the object of more heated debate than the “Super Ieremiam”; none has gained Joachim’s name and reputation more friends and disciples, and none more and fiercer enemies.“ (Research Project „Prophecy, Eschatology and Apocalypse“, Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg)
Wannenmacher closes her essay „Von Joachim? ‚Super Hieremiam'“ with a quotation from Ernst Bloch’s Erbschaft dieser Zeit (1962, p. 136) – for both, Joachim and pseudo-Joachim, applies: “ This is the real audacity of Joachim: He has directed the eyes fixed on the hereafter to an earthly future time and has expected his ideal not in heaven but on earth. He proclaimed the freedom of the new viri spirituales not as freedom from the world, but for a new world.“
On the people involved in the publishing of Super Hieremiam see our note to Joachim’s Liber Concordie.
(The first two quotes are from R. Moynihan, The Development of the „Pseudo-Joachim“ commentary „Super Hieremiam“: New manuscript evidence. In: Mélanges de l’École française de Rome – Moyen Âge 1986-1, p. 109-142.)