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The millennium in Renaissance Italy: a persecuted belief?

Until the 1970s, millenarianism, and apocalypticism generally, were given a low priority in Renaissance research, undermining as they did the image of a pre-modern and secular age on which claims for the distinct nature of the period rested. The balance has been substantially redressed in the growing number of studies which have shown not only that Renaissance figures harboured comparable, if not more fervent, apocalyptic hopes and fears to earlier periods, but also that such ideas were not the exclusive property of marginalized or populist groups.’ With the realization that prophecy and apocalyptic thought were both more widespread and more respectable in the Renaissance than had been thought, the opportunity has arisen to reassess the nature of the relationship between these ideas, orthodoxy and authority. This paper examines that relationship as it developed in Italy in the early sixteenth century, when the Catholic Church faced a variety of political and spiritual challenges to its authority, but before what could be termed the reactionary stage of the Catholic Reformation had gathered pace.