News from the Future. Letters, Prophecies and the Public Sphere in Late Medieval Florence

In premodern Europe, prophecy was both an incisive weapon in the struggle for power and a medium to convey information. In this article, I examine the circulation in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Florence of a prophetic dispatch: the so-called Toledo Letter, an old prophecy updated several times in late medieval Europe. The five different versions of the letter I have located in Florence are an ideal case study in the reception of prophecies as texts which frame the ongoing natural and political disasters in a broader religious narrative, place them in a temporality in which past and future overlap, and encourage the readers to believe in what is announced.