ABSTRACT
A year after the death, in 1298, of the theologian Peter John Olivi, his fellow Franciscans gathered for their general chapter at Lyons and condemned his writings, ordering them to be burned.1 There were two issues in particular that concerned the leaders of the order. The first was Olivi’s interpretation of the vow of poverty which Franciscans had sworn to uphold; the second was Olivi’s suggestion that, contrary to the descriptions in the Gospel of John (19:31–4), Christ died after he was pierced in the side by a soldier’s spear, not before. Poverty was certainly the more important issue for the Franciscans gathered in Lyons, but the latter, more curious claim – Olivi seems to have been the first to put it in writing2 – would nonetheless continue to cause consternation, and not only within the Franciscan Order.3 This claim’s theoretical underpinnings, in fact, reveal an important medieval conception of the relationship between prophecy and mysticism.
