Visione e terapia dal Tardoantico al primo Medioevo: l’incubazione cristiana e l’ermeneutica del miracolo

The belief in the divinity’s healing intervention during the dream state is widespread in all the ancient cultures as well as in the modern folklore. In this paper will be discussed a few aspects of the question in late antique and early medieval literary sources. Through an historical-semantic and historiographic analysis, I will first explore the possibility of a new approach based on an anthropological reading of the text, which is particularly susceptible to the ritual performance of the healing dream. While contributing to the elaboration of the dreaming imagery and, thus, playing a decisive part in directing the expectations of health and salvation, the literary sources integrate with the complex active dynamic of the ‘miracle’. Only this methodology allows the historian to break the impasse, to which inevitably leads the sterile research of mere correspondences between an ancient ritual paradigm – that many scholars consider the unambiguous definition of incubation – and case studies based on the mechanic identification of the lowest common denominator that indeed includes the observable facts in the same paradigm