Giullare di Dio. Lo sguardo rovesciato di Francesco d’Assisi sul mondo

The jester is someone who symbolically walks upside down and thus offers an inverted view of the world. The expression “jester of God” (ioculator Domini) therefore sums up the cultural revolution of Francis of Assisi. His upside-down view originates from a particular Christian proposal, which, from the folly of intuition, is embodied both in material representation and in history, in the reality of the institution within the “ordered” forms of political, civil, religious and economic organisation. Fraternal life as mutual subjection, the radical renunciation of power and wealth in every respect, the position of submission and minority, the gratuitousness of the gift, nakedness as starvation and deprivation are all “reversed propositions” that invert – or hold together – inside and outside, being and appearing, vision and action, word and gesture, high and low, sublime and humble. This transformation of the forms of representation and conception of the world is still one of the keys to understanding humanistic culture and modernity as a whole. In this volume, scholars from various disciplines show how Francis' logic of reversal influenced the figurative arts, literature, preaching, devotion and drama, profoundly changing the institutional, political and economic culture of the medieval West.