Il corpo pubblico dell’aspirante santa. Catastrofi naturali e intercessione femminile nelle Devotioni di Brigida Morello di Gesù (1610-1679)

This contribution focuses on the textual dynamics that lead to the elaboration of the “public body” of the aspiring and interceding saint, beginning with recent historiographical attention to the role of saints in modern disaster narratives. The writings of Brigida Morello di Gesù, a seventeenth-century mystic and charismatic woman in Piacenza, reveal how the female oblate body constituted a bridge between God and the entire Christian community, as well as between phenomenal, material reality and the supernatural world of divine will. In particular, the intercessory practices promoted by Brigida during the Rimini earthquake of 1661 demonstrate, on the one hand, the performative potential of the female oblate body, and, on the other hand, highlight the significance of female charisms in relation to the autopoietic processes associated with writing.