Le recluse e il Corpus Domini

Historians have always recognized in Eucharistic devotion one of the traits that characterize the phenmenon of voluntary reclusion, a penitential religious way of life in cell that had its heyday in the West between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The author tries to determine whether and to what extent this assumption has been reflected in normative and hagiographic texts. After an extensive review of Vitae of holy "Italian" and foreign recluses, the author suggests that "the Eucharist as the center of devotional practice of recluses´os a topos resulting from the extension to all anchoresses of a trait that characterizes only the lives of many holy recluses, but not all of them. She demonstrates, in fact, that the Eucharistic devotion linked to the phenomenon of voluntary reclusion appears in a "virulent way" in hagiographical sources only in certain areas and at certain historical moments, those close to the Eucharistic controversy or when the fight against the heretics was harder - trait, however, that characterizes also the Vitae of saints tout court.