La caduta da cavallo. Il fatto e le interpretazioni

Through a dossier of historical and hagiographic sources, the essay shows how falling from a horse was a very frequent and frightening type of accident in medieval society. Awareness of this marks the experience of the elites who indeed could have had in the horse a tool and a symbol of power, but also a circumstance of risk. In the tradition of biblical exegesis (starting from the foundations that can be referred to Gregory the Great’s commentaries) we find attempts to interpret this fact: the falling horseman could be the sign of a divine judgement on the world and the wicked, but also the example of the convert who, by falling, will be saved. Studying the articulation and the fortune of these interpretative schemes, the essay examines in its second part the fall that marks the apostle Paul’s conversion and proposes an interpretative hypothesis regarding the fact that it (at least from the end of the eleventh century) begins to be represented as a fall from a horse, in direct contrast to the New Testament account (which has Paul falling while walking.