Cose che fanno miracoli. Il potere degli oggetti nell'immaginario benedettino della prima età moderna

[Autom. eng. transl.] The volume looks at the cultural climate of the Benedictine congregation of Cassino to focus on how deeply rooted the belief in miracles was and how much of a role it played in the certainty that certain objects helped to cause them. This belief constitutes the most elementary level of a feeling of faith that often intersects with the survivals of magic and superstition, making us understand to what extent even in the age of the Counter-Reformation a renewed religious attitude continued to coexist with an archaic dimension of the approach to the supernatural. In this sense, therefore, the experience of the monks becomes a breeding ground for grasping the meaning of the miracle in the sensibility of the old regime, here observed through a bundle of episodes taken from a literature of which the people of Cassino were either architects or clients. The investigation begins with the mythology of water, then extends to the broader context of beliefs based on the active power of liquid and oily materials, with particular attention to cults connected to the collection of the so-called ‘manna of the saints’, then again to those in which a central role is assigned to the humours of the body, to coagulated blood, to bone dust, and finally to relics consisting of objects of daily use, along a line that often postulates the elementary gesture of contact and the anthropophagous one of ingestion.