Miracolo e santità nella vita e nelle agiografie di Domenico

In the hagiography on St Dominic produced until around 1260, the miraculous dimension highlights and attests to the prophetic and visionary, rather than therapeutic, nature of his holiness. In the following decades, until the early fourteenth century, new collections of miracles—with the significant exception of Cecilia—primarily responded to the need to establish and spread his cult, as an identity emblem of the Order, at critical moments in the institutional history of the Preaching Friars. A brief historiographical review justifies the focus on an analysis of the miracles in his lifetime and their authentication criteria, primarily the autopsy. The purpose is to show that a historical-religious profile of the figure of Dominic is evident from the hagiographic sources, emerging from the manifestations and perception of his holiness among his contemporaries. Dominic was a tenacious visionary, yet sensitive to the concreteness of history, and the hagiography on him, beginning with Jordan, confirms this without exception. This thus confirms the historiographical acquisition of the last two decades regarding the centrality of prophethood, especially in its eschatological guise, and the focus on the regular identity of the Preaching Friars up to the 1250s.