Eremite in città. Il fenomeno della reclusione urbana femminile nell’età comunale : il caso di Pisa

Abstract

After a review of studies that treat the phenomenon of voluntary reclusion on the Italian peninsula, the author gives a synthetic presentation of the results of her research on Pisa, based on local wills and testaments, which are particularly informative about this formof religious life, whereas in other urban contexts the phenomenon is know through varied sources, civil and ecclesiastic. Once the coherence of the corpus is established, an account is made of the characteristic traits of the testators retained for analysis, followed by an evaluation of the quality of the information gathered concerning the recluses and their urban hermitages. Qualitative and quantitative variations in the phenomenon, from the mid thirteenth to the late fourteenth century, are then studied. Information concerning the best documented recluses in Pisa is used to reconstruct their relations with the urban community that houses each of them and to map the hermitages in the city and immediate environs in order of understand the function of the hermitages within the urban structure and to evaluate to what extent the relations established with local civil and ecclesiastical institutions and the urban environment can lead to the identification of the phenomenon of voluntary reclusion as one of the many expressions of urban religion.

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