Marco Rainini came to Notre Dame as a visiting scholar of Church History from L’Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in August and September of 2024. During this period, Professor Rainini worked on his “Critical Edition of Joachim of Fiore.” As part of this arrangement, he gave a series of two lectures on this subject. Both lectures, the first on August 30th and the second on September 5th, were well-attended by students and faculty from the Department of Classics, the Center of Italian Studies, and the Medieval Institute.
In his first lecture, Rainini detailed briefly the biography of Joachim of Fiori (a Cistercian monk from Calabria) who produced textual and visual exegeses of the Bible. By categorizing episodes from the Old and New Testament, Joachim sought to demonstrate that the Old Testament functions as an allegory for the life of Jesus in the New Testament. In other words, to quote St. Augustine, “the New is hidden in the Old, and the Old becomes clear in the New.” In his second lecture, Rainini expanded upon the apocalyptic thinking embedded in Joachim’s work and the reception of that Apocalypticism by later scholars and theologians. Throughout both lectures, Rainini spoke in depth on his methods for incorporating image analysis into his research. In sum, this lecture series was an engaging and enriching start to a promising new school year.