"Pueruli Jesu piae sorores". Il culto del Divino Infante nella tradizione della religiosità femminile domenicana fra Medioevo ed età moderna

This work aims to reconstruct the many phases of the Infant Jesus worship, in the frame of the Dominican female saintliness, between Middle Ages and Modern Age. If firstly the author highly underlines the Dominican contribution in the spread of this worship, on the other hand the same author trys to detect the devotion self, apparently obscure and elusive, due the fact that the religious women used to celebrate Baby Jesus through dolls and cradles. Three interpreta- tions are thus applied, in order to understand these devotional systems, namely the theological interpretation, and then the historical-literary and the anthropo- logical ones. In fact, it seems possible to conceive Baby Jesus worship as virtuous chain, formed by texts, devotional objects and art of the memory.