Presenza-assenza. Meccanismi dell'istituzionalità nella societas Christiana (secoli IX-XIII).

By what means did medieval institutions try to produce forms of presence that went beyond physical presence? The popes supplemented the itinerancy typical of the Empire with the invention of legacies that generated a fictitious presence, but in every way equivalent to the presence of the sovereigns, as also happened through images, epistolography, performances halfway between theatre and liturgy, and documents intended as generators of presence. Apparitions, mystical experiences and diabolic possessions populated the imagination of medieval man, who believed in the co-presence of the living and the dead and ritualised it. Even monks and hermits, by definition absent from the world, felt the need to justify their ecclesiastical function and to be somehow present in the Church and society. The religious orders of the late Middle Ages thus introduced organisational innovations accompanied by the systematic dissemination of liturgical customs, cults and norms capable of generating a present and pervasive institutionality also through the processes of symbolisation. A process of progressive reduction of the importance of physical presence was thus accomplished to the advantage of the creation of transpersonal mechanisms capable of generating fictitious presence.