Disabilità infantile e dinamiche inclusive: attualità della Tarda Antichità

Hagiography is one of the many significant aspects that contributed to the ‘expansion’ of Late Antiquity and represents a valuable ‘channel’ of information on one of the most disadvantaged categories, namely that of the poor and the sick. The physical and/or psychic impairment of these human groups constitutes the focus of disability studies, within which a research area of particular interest is the disabled, deformed, abandoned childhood. An eloquent example of this almost invisible ‘slice’ of society is offered by Gregory of Tours’ De virtutibus sancti Martini which, in the happy ending of the miraculous healing, can represent a testimony of the social-welfare and ‘inclusive’ activity connected with leadership of the bishops, ‘organizers’ of the cult of relics.