The metaphor evoked by the title represents a fundamental field of research for the religious as well as the cultural history of Christian Europe. In the ten chapters of the book – the first three have a more synthetic quality and contain, at the same time, an open methodological reflection; the remaining seven present a more specific essay-like approach – the systemic balance between the effectiveness of gesture and images and relics and the effectiveness of the written word, considered as a vehicle of cultural memory, are examined. The written word fixed in our sources is not merely an external evidence of the above power relations: the cult of saints, from the codified liturgical expressions to the ‘spontaneous’ demonstrations of devotion, is always an operational language in which the structural or exceptive balance of power between men and invisible forces finds its articulation. The written word, in all its rhetorical, ideological and performative aspects, can always be considered an active and integral part of its original historical reality, of which it bears evidence, while simultaneously contributing to shape it. Gesture, rite, word and image are part of the same historical dynamics. They are the communicative vehicles through which the individual and social experience, called religion, finds its specific expression. In other words, in the darkest forms of the cult of saints we cannot fail to recognise the profile itself of a political and mediological history of Christianity. The book is centred on the history of the rhetorics by which the presence of the Invisible in the European societies, from Late Antiquity to the threshold of the Modern Age, reveals itself through gestures, the written word and the reception of texts and images

Contents:
1. Le ragioni dell’invisibile tra il sacro e la religione - 2. Biografia, agiografia e persona. Una genealogia del discorso biografico - 3. Dai tesori alle collezioni. Verso un’archeologia economica delle res sacrae - 4. Immagini e statue miracolose tra Antichità e Medioevo - 5. La fanciulla perseguitata. Tra miti di fondazione e riti del patrocinio civico - 6. Il nome e il come. Nascita di un culto nell’Italia altomedievale - 7. « De initio ordinis ». Una antropologia storica del mito di fondazione 8. Il passero spennato. Direzione spirituale e agiografia al femminile - 9. I miracoli di san Domenico tra agiografia e veridizione - 10. La prova del fuoco o l’ordalia della memoria domenicana - INDICI : Indice delle fonti manoscritte - Indice dei nomi di persona - Indice dei nomi di luogo es.

LUIGI CANETTI (Parma, 1966) teaches History of Christianity and of the Churches at the faculty of Cultural Heritage at the Università di Bologna, in Ravenna. Among his works: «Gloriosa Civitas». Culto dei santi e società cittadina a Piacenza nel Medioevo, Bologna, Pàtron, 1993; L’invenzione della memoria. Il culto e l’immagine di Domenico nella storia dei primi frati Predicatori, Spoleto, CISAM, 1996; Frammenti di eternità. Corpi e reliquie tra Antichità e Medioevo, Roma, Viella, 2002.




ISBN 978-88-7988-061-9 ISBN 978-88-7988-061-9