Past Masters

Raymond Williams

  • Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the 19th Century by Marjorie Reeves and Warwick Gould
    Oxford, 365 pp, £35.00, March 1987, ISBN 0 19 826672 3
  • Beauty and Belief: Aesthetics and Religion in Victorian Literature by Hilary Fraser
    Cambridge, 287 pp, £25.00, January 1987, ISBN 0 521 30767 8
  • The Correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton edited by John Bradley and Ian Ousby
    Cambridge, 537 pp, £45.00, April 1987, ISBN 0 521 32091 7

What can we possibly say of the claim that ‘the first great revolutionary movements in Europe’ were all ‘more or less imbued with the ideas of Joachim of Fiore’? Or, if ‘more or less’ offers an escape clause, what can we say of another claim: that ‘Joachim created the aggregate of symbols which govern the self-interpretation of modern political society to this day’? Or that ‘it is hardly too much to claim that the vague and powerful assumptions we all make about historical transition have their roots in Joachism’?

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