Problemi d’identità. Le prime comunità femminili legate ai predicatori tra distinzione e appartenenza

The individual or a whole community that enters in contact with a particular milieu of under religious rule finds itself immediately confronted by the question of distinction. The instruments of differentiation also have a slower, propaedeutic function. In reality, they communicate « Leitideen » which, at the base of any given religious experience, fashion the individual or collective identity. In the oldest female religious communities linked in various ways to the Dominican order, these dynamics matured along with the progressive formation of an identity. The construction of the identity was partially related to the process of incorporation, a difficult and unpredictable passage that characterized the life of these groups for decades. Certain diplomatic and normative hagiographic sources of the thirteenth century provide a privileged observation point, especially the Vita beate Diane and the Miracula beati Dominici, when inscribed in a perspective of the comparative history of religious orders.