‘Vagatio mentis’. L’ossessione per le immagini tra amore, peccato e malattia

The paper offers an analysis of different types of sources – literary, religious, and juridical – that address the issue of the medieval obsession with images and the ways in which they influenced the minds of individuals. These testimonies are the product of a shared imaginary and are presented as evidence of the rationalisation of forms of malaise in the imaginal realm. They all attempted, each with its own linguistic, rhetorical, and communicative codes, to account for the influence that material and immaterial images could exert on the minds of individuals, for example by causing states of profound psychic and physical prostration.