David Dwight Burr, Professor Emeritus of History at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, died on December 6, 2025 at the age of 91. I feel his loss keenly. Others have reflected and will reflect on his life in depth, but here my task is to review Poverty, Eschatology and the Medieval Church: Studies in Honor of David Burr, a scholarly tribute to someone who dedicated his professional life to studying Franciscans at the fringe of their Order in the Middle Ages, and in particular, Peter of John Olivi. This volume bears witness to many of the connections David forged with scholars nationally and internationally, and reflects the wide range of his scholarship. The chapters are grouped into four sections, the first of which focuses on the historiography of David Burr; the second centers on Joachim of Fiore’s apocalypticism and its legacy; the third—the longest of the four—focuses on Peter of John Olivi; and the final section examines the Spiritual Franciscans and their forerunners.
After an introduction by co-editors Michael F. Cusato, O.F.M. and Dabney G. Park, Kevin Madigan introduces David to those who didn’t know him, providing a sense of the richness of his career and life experiences. Madigan details each of David’s major publications, focusing in particular on The Spiritual Franciscans, whose narrative quality and masterful analysis earned the book no fewer than three prizes. At the end of the chapter, Madigan describes the “wit that enlivens [David’s works]” and “the clarity that makes them accessible and even delightful to read” (21-22). This characterization rings true for me, as someone who not infrequently returns to The Spiritual Franciscans and others of David’s works with a sense of joy.
Next, two review essays engage with David’s The Book of Revelation, published in 2019 by Eerdmans as part of its series, The Bible in Medieval Tradition. These chapters, the first by Robert Lerner and the second by Alberto Forni and Paolo Vian, provide different angles of analysis on David’s last book, pointing to the ways in which he departed from previous research on Olivi and his apocalyptic, as well as to the directions that future scholars might take.
In his scholarship, David Burr demonstrated that Peter of John Olivi drew deeply from the well of Joachim’s apocalyptic thought, but then used that water to irrigate fields that he cultivated in his own historical moment. The chapters on Joachim of Fiore present three different approaches to the study of the Calabrian abbot and his influence. Gian Luca Potestà examines Joachim’s allegorical figure of the “New Babylon” and then looks at how Olivi modified this trope for his own context at the end of the thirteenth century. Marco Bartoli considers the history of a prophecy that compares the progression of the ages of human history with the stages of human development to ask whether Joachim’s inversion of the traditional analogy (such that the human perfection reached at the end of time became a state of innocence and [spiritualized] rebirth) can be connected to trends within wider medieval society, most specifically a change in theological culture and mentalité at the end of the Middle Ages that he associates with the development of charitable institutions like hospitals and orphanages intended to take care of children without parents or guardians (124).
Marco Rainini turns to Joachim’s so-called Liber figurarum—a collection of diagrams and symbols illustrating various concepts relating to salvation history. But what is the Liber figurarum, exactly? The answer isn’t straightforward. Manuscripts featuring the Liber figurarum date from between the first quarter of the thirteenth century through the fourteenth century, but individual diagrams also appear elsewhere in manuscripts of Joachim’s other works (79). Since Joachim’s writings contain no reference to a work that brings all of these diagrams together, it is likely that Joachim himself did not assemble or author the Liber figurarum. Rainini’s close examination of Joachim’s lesser works alongside the figurae supports the view that the diagrams in the Liber figurarum represent discrete moments in the evolution of Joachim’s eschatology and not a cohesive view of his thought (83).
The section on Peter of John Olivi focuses primarily on texts, editions, and manuscript traditions. Gilbert Dahan’s chapter gives a glimpse into the process Olivi adopted in his analysis of scripture, by considering the tools he employed for the task as well as some of the textual questions that interested him as a scholar, while C. Colt Anderson considers the twin influences of Joachim of Fiore and Bonaventure of Bagnoregio on Olivi’s exegesis. Olivi clearly drew on Joachim’s approach to the interpretation of scripture; however, the Franciscan was much more influenced by Bonaventure, whose exegetical approach foregrounded the necessity of reinterpreting scripture as historical circumstances change.
Perhaps the most famous of Olivi’s scripture commentaries is the Lectura super Apocalypsim (LSA). Two chapters engage this work, which the Franciscan completed before his death in 1297. First, Alberto Forni and Paolo Vian examine two key manuscripts that are part of the earliest diffusion of the text in the first half of the fourteenth century. The LSA circulated in two basic forms, which together provide a fascinating look into the transmission and even transformation of the written text of Olivi’s commentary. The curial tradition of the text contains the oldest codex, copied at the papal curia in Avignon. By necessity, however, this textual tradition was a dead end: after the pope had censured and condemned the LSA, “no one in the ‘curial’ milieu could take an interest in transcribing this text” (180). By contrast, the conventual tradition took root separately, and became a kind of “laboratory” in which readers “transformed” and “manipulated” the LSA both to make the text less risky to possess and to make it better meet the needs of its readers (181). Then, in the next chapter, Warren Lewis turns to the theme of Olivi’s philosophy of evil in the Lectura super Apocalypsim.
In his contribution, Sylvain Piron offers David “The Last Unedited Question of Olivi on Evangelical Perfection,” in which the friar examined “suspicious encounters with women” (218). Although Olivi initially wrote the seventh Quaestio disputata de perfectione evangelica (QPE 7)after questions one through six and before questions eight and nine, as David had established in the past, Piron determines that the Franciscan later returned to the question to redact a new version that was almost entirely different (albeit substantively more or less the same). The first version of QPE 7 bears the first appearance of Olivi’s concept of indeterminate vows (223) that would later be developed in QPE 9 on usus pauper, or poor use. By contrast, in the second version Olivi no longer refers to indeterminate vows, but the challenge of distinguishing what might be considered a suspicious encounter with women, and contains references to his treatise on venial sin (composed after the first version of QPE 7). With Piron’s edition, scholars now have access to all of Olivi’s Quaestiones disputatae de perfectione evangelica.
At the end of The Book of Revelation, published in 2019, David Burr briefly considered the different career trajectories and exegetical approaches of Peter of John Olivi and Nicholas of Lyra. Here, Philip D. Krey returns to these two friars who both sought to defend Franciscan values, but whose career trajectories, biblical hermeneutic, and theology of history combined to make them very different figures (who had vastly different afterlives). Comparing each Franciscan’s commentary on the Gospel of Luke—looking specifically at the Parable of the Unjust Steward and the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus—yields interesting results. Whereas Olivi concludes that poor people in general should receive alms (not simply those deemed “deserving”), Lyra disagrees: only those who are just (that is, the religious poor) should receive alms. With respect to accumulating wealth, Olivi finds it problematic in general from a Christian perspective because it leads to inequities. By contrast, Lyra maintains that how accumulated wealth is used determines whether it is good or bad. Nicholas of Lyra taught a wider audience that included not only Franciscans but members of other religious orders as well as secular clergy while he was Regent Master at the University of Paris, unlike Olivi, who taught in Franciscan studia.
In the last contribution to this section of the volume, Fortunato Iozzelli, O.F.M. provides a view onto the survival of some of Olivi’s writings by analyzing the ways that Bernardino of Siena incorporated passages from Olivi’s commentary on the Gospel of John into his sermon on the Visitation of the Virgin Mary. Bernardino didn’t simply copy Olivi, but worked to improve Olivi’s rhetorical style, added affective language, and inserted moral reflections, with the goal of making the message more accessible to the large, public audiences that typically gathered for his sermons.
The final section of the volume looks at Spiritual Franciscans and their forerunners. First up is Dabney G. Park’s chapter on the so-called trial of John of Parma. Scholars have long repeated an assortment of common elements regarding this event: Pope Alexander IV dismissed John of Parma or asked him to resign as Minister General; and once Bonaventure became Minister General, he tried John to evaluate his orthodoxy. This chapter is a great contribution to the volume because of the way it systematically reviews sources dated within 120 years of John’s resignation to correct the commonplace narrative that does not bear sustained scrutiny. In fact, all of the sources (save one) state that John stepped down voluntarily. And ironically, Angelo Clareno, who viewed John of Parma as a true Franciscan spirit persecuted by the villainous Bonaventure, seems to have been partly responsible for besmirching John’s reputation as the only early author to describe an event like a trial.
Michael F. Cusato, O.F.M. opens his chapter on John of Murrovalle with a deep nod to David Burr’s The Spiritual Franciscans. In that study, David got into the nitty-gritty of the conflict between the so-called Spiritual Franciscans and Franciscan authorities, giving a real sense of the personalities involved. Here, Cusato takes a similarly granular approach towards the Franciscan Cardinal John of Murrovalle, who later also became Cardinal Protector of the Franciscan Order. As Cardinal Protector, John was well-positioned to champion the concerns of the community of brothers (against those of the rigorists) at the Curia. As a result, Franciscan rigorists needed to find their own patrons in high places, one of which was the Catalan physician, Arnald of Villanova, who had ties to the royal courts of Aragon and Sicily in addition to connections within the Papal Curia (370). In 1309, in an address before the entire Curia at Avignon, Arnald shamed John of Murrovalle and another Franciscan Cardinal, Gentile da Montefiore, for persecuting the rigorist brothers rather than defending their dedication to poverty. A similar—but less dramatic—denunciation of the two Franciscan Cardinals is contained within the Liber de Flore, a pseudo-Joachite text from the early fourteenth century, with possible connections to Arnald of Villanova, that Cusato turns to at the end of his chapter.
Delfi I. Nieto-Isabel gives a vivid account of beguins in southern France and the relational structures that formed the basis of dissident identities among them. Relics, as “essentially relational elements,” played a key role in fostering a collective identity and shaping devotional practices (418). Overlapping networks within the wider beguin community created ties of shared identity between living community members and those who had paid with their lives for their beliefs, even for those without direct involvement with the human remains of martyred beguins.
If a history is a work that seeks to build a greater narrative out of smaller stories and discourses between specific figures as a way of interpreting events in the past, Antonio Montefusco argues in “Chronicle or History: The Uncertain Literary Genre of a Dissident Story,” then Angelo Clareno’s work—variously referred to as the Historia septem tribulationem Ordinis Minorum and the Liber chronicarum sive tribulationum Ordinis Minorum—is a history with a particular theology of history as its foundation. Traditionally, the author of a history would reflect in a prologue to the work on the assumptions in his analysis. Although Angelo’s work does not have a prologue, there is a cover letter (embedded in the middle of the work—most likely due to a copying error, Montefusco explains), in which Angelo says that the story of the order lies in “its past sufferings” (428-429). Angelo used this historical grounding in dissent and conflict to write a history of the first 100 years of the Franciscan Order. Rather than being a precursor to late medieval historiographical changes, Montefusco argues, Angelo Clareno participated in them actively, and his Chronicae “are surprisingly modern in the way they overcome the shoals of event-based narratives while in search of a deeper meaning for the unfolding of history” (440).
In the final chapter of this volume, Michele Lodone engages with the way rigorist Franciscans interpreted and recast Matthew 24, which is sometimes referred to as the Little Apocalypse or Olivet Discourse. While Angelo Clareno used Matthew 24 as a way to understand the current and future struggles of the Order and the Church, rigorist brothers who came after him developed a more complex parallel, making connections between Christ’s apocalyptic prophecies on the Mount of Olives before the crucifixion and the secrets or prophecies that tradition said had been revealed to Francis on La Verna before he received the stigmata. For most Franciscans, these secrets were reassuring prophecies about the future of the Order, but for men like Angelo Clareno and John of Rupescissa, who associated them with Matthew 24, these secrets took on an ominous cast. Looking at Franciscan commentaries on Matthew 24 and the way Franciscans have drawn on its themes can help scholars understand the complex, multi-layered nature of prophetic texts which often take on new, unexpected meanings in different time periods (454). In fact, Lodone, says, these texts remained important to Franciscan dissidents at least until the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.
This is a hefty volume which includes in-depth analyses of texts, textual editions, provocative ideas, and in many cases genuine engagement with David’s own work—adding to it, criticizing it, and reevaluating it, contributed by scholars from the United States and Europe. Thirteen of the chapters are in English, two of which were translated from Italian and another two from French. Five chapters are in Italian. It would have been better to be more consistent: either have all chapters translated into English or leave each in its original language. Similarly, some authors have translated Latin in the text of their chapters and put the Latin in their footnotes. Some have not. These are minor concerns that don’t make this volume any less of a fitting tribute to David Burr, a renowned scholar and cherished human being.