Identification d’un nouveau traité de Jean de Roquetaillade, Verba fratris Johannis de Rupescissa, qui reformule le contenu du Vademecum in tribulationeIdentificazione di un nuovo trattato di Giovanni di Rupescissa, Verba fratris Johannis de RupescissaIdentification of a new treatise by John of Rupescissa, Verba fratris Johannis de Rupescissa, being a reconsideration of the Vademecum in tribulation

Lerner, Robert E.

OpenEdition

 
Oliviana
Mouvements et dissidences spirituels XIIIe-XIVe siècles 
5 | 2016
5
Yet Another Work by John of Rupescissa
Robert E. Lerner
Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/oliviana/825
ISBN: 978-2-8218-1895-8
ISSN: 1765-2812
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Groupe d'anthropologie scolastique (Centre de recherches historiques-EHESS-CNRS)
 
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Robert E. Lerner, « Yet Another Work by John of Rupescissa », Oliviana [Online], 5 | 2016, Online since
31 December 2016, connection on 02 March 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/oliviana/825 
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© Oliviana
Yet Another Work by John of
Rupescissa
Robert E. Lerner
1 I  have marveled before at John of Rupescissa’s astounding literary productivity and
even invented  a  word for  it :  ‘megalopolygraphy’1.  Adding  up  the  writings  that  we
currently possess and a large number of others that he mentions but are lost it can
safely be estimated that the total comes to some forty treatises, commentaries,  and
letters.  This  would not seem like such a terribly large number were it  not  for  two
complementary facts: some of these works are exceedingly long, and most were written
in prison. And now I am able to call attention to yet another work. This one is quite
short and expresses themes that Rupescissa had dilated on at greater length elsewhere.
Nevertheless it bears its own interest.
2 The  text  I  have  in  mind  is  the  “Verba  fratris  Johannis  de  Rupescissa”.  Although  this
already has been published in a critical edition, it has been misidentified. It was noticed
first  by  the  founder  of  modern  Rupescissa  studies,  Jeanne  Bignami-Odier,  who
described it as “an extract from [Rupescissa’s] Vade mecum in tribulatione and [his] Liber
Ostensor”2. But how can a single work be an extract from two different works ? To deal
with the problem the editors of the Liber Ostensor (more properly the Liber ostensor quod
adesse  festinant  tempora)  decided without  supporting argumentation that  the “Verba
fratris Johannis de Rupescissa” is a “résumé” of the Liber Ostensor (hereafter I will use
the short title) and published it as such3. On the other hand, Elena Tealdi, in her expert
recent critical edition of the Vade mecum in tribulatione, considered the work to be a
resume of the Vade mecum4. Evidently the confusion is based on the heading of one of
the two retrieved manuscripts : “Verba fratris Johannis Repetissa qui dicitur Vade
mecum in tribulatione … abreviata de libro qui intitulatur Ostensore quot adesse festinant
tempora futurorum”5. Yet there is a simple explanation, for in the preface to the Vade
mecum Rupescissa states that he is expressing briefly what he already had written at
length “in volumine magno intitulato Liber ostensor quod adesse festinant tempora”6. On
this basis it would seem that Elena Tealdi had good reason to classify the Verba as a
resume of the Vade mecum.
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3 And yet close examination reveals that this solution is not quite right. In the first place
aside from occasional words or phrases verbatim repetitions are lacking in the Verba,
whereas  substantial  word-for-word  borrowings  are  customarily  present  in  genuine
abbreviations or resumes of the Vade mecum. Secondly, although the predictions in the
Verba largely  correspond  to  most  of  the  predictions  in  the  Vade  mecum through
intention twelve,  they appear in different order.  Consequently I  will  argue that the
Verba is Rupescissa’s reconsideration of the Vade mecum. 
 
Date and purpose
4 The  first  relevant  question  in  this  regard  pertains  to  dating.  The  Vade  mecum  was
written  late  in  1356:  the  year  is  given  as  the  annus  presens in  the  first  and  sixth
intentions, and the work shows cognizance of the battle of Poitiers (19 September 1356)
and refers to an earthquake that struck Basel on 18 October 1356. As for the Verba, it
almost certainly was written late in 1356, not only because it knows of the capture of
the French King at Poitiers but because it predicts events to occur in 1357 as if that year
had not yet come. (Rupescissa employed the stilus curie Romanie,  which had the new
year beginning on Christmas day.) And the Verba must have followed quickly on the
Vade mecum since it clearly depends on it. 
5 Obviously the most pressing question is whether Rupescissa himself was the author of
the “words” attributed to his name. One piece of evidence in favor of this identification
is that a reading in one of the two retrieved manuscripts has the author speaking in the
first person : “my lord the King of the French”7. It is difficult to imagine someone other
than Rupescissa taking on his persona. But there is even more compelling evidence. It
has been mentioned that the Verba contains no sustained borrowings from the Vade
mecum but that occasional words and phrases reappear. The best explanation for this is
that  Rupescissa  was  reconceiving  the  Vade  mecum without  having  the  text  directly
before him and in doing so employed words and phrases that were second nature to
him. Moreover,  original supercharged phrases in the Verba bear Rupescissa’s mark :
“doctrine solaris” ; “leone terroris” ; “potentia trinitatis.” To imagine another person
injecting language like this into a reworking of the Vade mecum would be to imagine a
second John the Astonishing. 
6 So now comes the question as to why Rupescissa would want to rework a treatise he
recently had written. The answer lies in structure. The chronology of events predicted
in the early intentions of the Vade mecum is jumbled. In the fourth intention the author
predicts the flight of the cardinals from Avignon before (infra) the fifteenth day of July
of  the  year  1362,  and  then  in  intention  five  he  predicts  a  series  of  horrendous
chastisements  that  will  begin  in  1360.  To  make  matters  worse,  in  intention  six  he
backtracks. There he states in what seems like an afterthought that the flight of the
cardinals from Avignon foretold in intention four and the chastisements enumerated in
intention five would not be able to take place were it not for a dramatic weakening of
the power of the king of France. To make the appropriate correction at this point he
explains that wars to follow the capture of the king [at Poitiers] in the years 1357, 1358,
and 1359 would much worse than before, and that among other things there would be
wars between the people of France [the king being hors de combat] and the adversaries
of  the  kingdom.  In  contrast,  all  this  confusion  disappears  in  the  Verba,  for  there
Rupescissa proceeds seamlessly from 1357 to 1360 to 1362 to 13658. It is as if he had
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experienced another of his many visions and an angel had appeared to him to say “thou
shouldst be more coherent.”
7 It now needs to be observed that the Verba fratris Johannis de Rupescissa is not only a
restructured version of the Vade mecum but that it also is greatly stripped down. In
most cases the substance of the prophecies in the first twelve intentions remains, but
there  is  less  supplementary  rhetoric  and  the  text  is  denuded  of  elaborations  and
scriptural proof-texts. One consequence is less vividness. For example, one of the most
memorable passages of the Vade mecum is the passages in intention five which foretells
how earthworms will rise to devour lions and leopards and song birds will rip apart
falcons and hawks. But this is missing from the Verba, as is the succeeding passage that
tells  of  “popular  justice”  wreaking  vengeance  on  tyrants  and  an  affliction  of  the
nobility more than can be believed. It is reasonable to wonder whether Rupescissa was
censoring himself because missing too are the millenarian references in intention nine
(“mille anni ad litteram solares”, “princeps pacis millenarie”, “mille anni solares”) and
also the Joachite term “tertius status” (as in Vade mecum: 238, 117). Nevertheless these
absences still appear to be best explained as the result of stripping down.
8 Doubtless it is true that the extended millenarian intentions – nineteen and twenty –
are missing in the Verba as well.  But this raises the question of why the text stops
abruptly at the equivalent of the Vade mecum’s twelfth intention. Self-censoring could
hardly be the explanation because the Vade mecum’s thirteenth intention would not be
an obvious barrier to continuing: like many of the earlier intentions recapitulated in
the Verba, this one concentrates on foretelling chastisements. Nor is there a concluding
doxology or colophon as one finds in Rupescissa’s other works. Evidently,  then, the
Verba stops where it does because of an accidental mutilation – a folio or two got lost.
 
Circulation
9 The  comparatively  colorless  quality  of  the  work  may  best  explain  its  limited
circulation. As mentioned, just two copies have been retrieved. Yet both have some
special interest. The first appears in a manuscript now in the Parker Library of Corpus
Christi College, Cambridge and copied originally in the priory of Norwich Cathedral9.
This  is  a  witness  to  the  remarkably  swift  circulation  of  Rupescissa’s  prophecies  in
Britain.  I  have  established  that  a  minimum  of  eight  copies  of  the  Vade  mecum
identifiable as British (one was Scottish) can be dated to the years between c. 1357 and
no later than 1364, i.e. one to eight years after the composition of the original work.
Now, with the closely related Verba, we have two more that come close to those limits.
That is, the Cambridge copy had to have been made before 29 October 1365 because it
appears in the manuscript together with predictions based on a planetary conjunction
of that date10. I count a minimum of two English copies because the Cambridge one had
to have been based on a missing exemplar. As for the context, the Verba was set down
in this manuscript in a short prophetic anthology that included a glossed “Erithean
Sibyl”. By implication, then, it was thought to have authority.
10 What would have made the Verba of particular interest to English readers ? First of all it
foretells toward the opening that even after the capture of the French king wars fought
by the “Prince of Wales” (the Black Prince) and the English against the French would
continue and get worse. This would have looked like an accurate prediction during the
time  when  the  Black  Prince  invaded  France  from  the  north  in  October  1359  and
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continued a military campaign that  threatened Reims and ended with the Peace of
Brétigny of May 1360. And another plausible reason relates to the Verba’s prophecy of
coming  “unheard  of  pestilences,”  for  the  first  devastating  recurrence  of  the  Black
Death struck England in 1361. In fact one of the rare specific observations attesting to
the reception of the Vade mecum comes from a statement in a Scottish chronicle that
“the result and outcome of his prophecy [the Vade mecum] was seen, for in the kingdom
of Scotland it turned out as he foretold because a second extremely severe mortality
began on the feast of the Purification of Our Lady [1362] and lasted until Christmas”11.
11 The second retrieved copy of the Verba takes us very far away from the first. This one
was made around 1470 by someone in the service of Margrave Lodovico Gonzaga of
Mantua who placed it together with a large number of other prophecies12. In this case it
underwent a variety of scribal liberty that can be considered pious fraud, for the dates
of  the  original  were  changed  arbitrarily  to  fit  the  period  from  1472  to  1477.  The
phenomenon of re-dating prophecies to make them applicable to the near future was
common ; a large number of copies of the Vade mecum contain a re-dating that switch
dates from the 1360s to the 1460s. To inquire into the motivation of the re-dating in the
Mantua copy would take too much research into northern Italian events of c. 1470 to be
worthwhile here. The real puzzle is how the same text known to have been in Norwich
in the early 1360s made its way to northern Italy around 1470, but this appears to be
insolvable. All one can say is habent sua fata prophetie.
 
Post scriptum
12 After completing this short article I received Mathias Kaup, ed., John of Rupescissa’s Vade
mecum in tribulacione (1356) : A Late Medieval Eschatological Manual for the Forthcoming
Thirteen Years of Horror and Hardship (London, Routledge 2017). This publication, which
sets back Rupescissa studies by presenting a superfluous edition of a work that had
been published in an exemplary edition by Elena Tealdi two years earlier, makes the
mistake at p. 91 of categorizing the Verba as “mainly consistent excerpts from the Vade
mecum and the Liber ostensor,” evidently without examining the contents of the text,
and compounds the error by misdating both of the manuscript witnesses.
NOTES
1. Robert E. Lerner, « “John the Astonishing” », Oliviana, 3, 2009. URL : http://oliviana.revues.org/
335
2. Jeanne Bignami-Odier, Études sur Jean de Roquetaillade (Johannes de Rupescissa), Paris, Vrin,
1952, p. 251.
3. Jean de Roquetaillade, Liber ostensor quod adesse festinant tempora, ed., André Vauchez et al.,
Rome,  EFR,  2005,  p. 859-863.  Christian  Jostmann,  Sibilla  Erithea  Babilonica.  Papsttum  und
Prophetie im 13. Jahrhundert, Hannover, Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2006, p. 437 makes the same
assumption that the work is a series of extracts from the Liber ostensor.
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4. Giovanni di Rupescissa, Vade mecum in tribulatione, ed. Elena Tealdi, Milano, Vita e pensiero,
2015, p. 308. The same decision was made by Lesley A. Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs in Later
Medieval England, York, Boydell & Brewer, 2000, p. 151, 240. 
5. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 16021, f. 5 v-6r. The other retrieved manuscript,
Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 138, f. 84v, gives simply “Verba fratris Iohannis de Rupescissa
.  .  .  abreviata  de  libro  qui  intitulatur  Ostensor  futurorum.”  The  likelihood  is  great  that  the
omission here of “qui dicitur Vade mecum in tribulatione” arose from the confusing rubric. 
6. Vade mecum, ed. Tealdi edition, p. 218, par. 10.
7. Verba, as in Liber Ostensor, Vauchez et al. (as n.2) p. 856, n. 12.
8. Specifically the Verba presents material from the Vade mecum in the following revised order:
prologue; [ints. 1-3 lacking] int. 5, “primo”; int. 5, “tertio”; int. 4; int. 5, “secundo”; int. 5, “sexto”;
[ints. 6-7 lacking] int. 8; int. 9; [int. 10 lacking] int. 11; int. 12. 
9. M.R.  James,  A  Descriptive  Catalogue  of  the  Manuscripts  in  the  Library  of  Corpus  Christi  College
Cambridge,  Cambridge, 1910, 1, p. 313-318. See also Coote, Prophecy,  p 150, 240, and Jostmann,
Sibilla Erithea, p. 437.
10. James, 315, with the mistaken date of 1364.
11. Walter  Bower,  Scotichronicon,  vol.  7,  ed.  D.E.R.  Watt,  Edinburgh,  1996,  p.  318-19.  The
occurrence of a devastating plague in Scotland in 1362 is confirmed independently by John of
Fordun, Chronica Gentis Scotorum, ed. William F. Skene, Edinburgh, 1871, 1, 381-82. 
12. Jostmann, p. 479-80.
ABSTRACTS
Identification of a new treatise by John of Rupescissa, Verba fratris Johannis de Rupescissa, being a
reconsideration of the Vademecum in tribulatione 
Identification d’un nouveau traité de Jean de Roquetaillade, Verba fratris Johannis de Rupescissa, qui
reformule le contenu du Vademecum in tribulatione
Identificazione di un nuovo trattato di Giovanni di Rupescissa, Verba fratris Johannis de Rupescissa
INDEX
Mots-clés: Cambridge Corpus Christi College Parker Library 138 ; Paris BNF lat. 16021
AUTHOR
ROBERT E. LERNER
Northwestern University, Evanston IL
Yet Another Work by John of Rupescissa
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Yet Another Work by John of Rupescissa

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Yet Another Work by John of Rupescissa

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