La profezia nel Cinquecento, la profezia nel Novecento

The essay reconstructs the meaning of the research that, from the late 1980s onwards, Innocenzo Cervelli dedicated to the ancient world, to classical historiography and to the prophetic tradition. It highlights how the author has taken up some research ideas suggested by Momigliano, who died in 1987, and to what extent he continued to confront the figure of that great historian of antiquity through a series of investigations that would be culminating in the monograph dedicated to the sibyls (2002). Cervelli thoroughly analyzed the texts of Flavio Giuseppe and the fathers of the Church, those of the scholastic theologians and the humanists of the fifteenth century, without neglecting the history of hermeticism and the iconographic representation of the sibyls. In this phase of his research the reflection on the apocalyptic writings of Ernesto de Martino and those of Benjamin, Scholem, E. Bloch, Walzer, Yerushalmi and Assmann, was also important. The theme of the prophecy also inspired some essays that Cervelli dedicated to Savonarola, Machiavelli and Bodin through the history of the theory of succession of empires. Moreover, in those same years, he reflected also on the religious and political legitimacy of the war starting from the ancient world, criticizing the abuse of history to justify the new military aggressions of our time.