L’Istoria di Sant'Ursula di Antoni di Oliveri. Sul contesto e il testimone di un'agiografia in volgare siciliano del XV secolo

The Istoria di sant’Ursula by Antoni d’Oliveri from Catania is among the texts published by Giuseppe Cusimano in the two inaugural volumes of the «Collezione di testi siciliani dei secoli XIV e XV». This hagiographic work is a Sicilian ottava-rima cantare dated to 1471 and is preserved in the late fifteenth-century manuscript Palermo, Biblioteca Comunale, 2 Qq B 91. This article examines the Istoria within the context of fifteen-century Sicilian literature. In particular, it shows how the attention to Saint Ursula, one of the most popular Breton saints, and her legend is not fortuitous from the point of view of both the history of piety and the mentality of medieval Sicily. This argument is supported by two closely related approaches: first, it is demonstrated by the analysis, from a ‘material’ perspective, of the production and use of religious codices and miscellanies in fifteenth-century Sicily; finally, it is placed within the context of a renovated devotion to saints (and specifically of Saint Ursula), which appears to be interconnected with a sociocultural climate that aimed to edify a rising aristocratic and bourgeois class.