Dal Gargano all'Elicona: la Memoria di san Michele fra agiografia ed elegia

The article investigates the medieval lore of the hagiographic legend Memoria sancti Michaelis (BHL 5948) containing the foundation myth of the Saint Michael’s Sanctuary on the Mount Gargano. In the first section of the paper a great deal of hagiographic collections and handbooks, mainly written by clerics of the Dominican Order, are taken into account for purposes of examining selections and content changes which the original text has undergone in the Medieval Reception. A culminating point of its transmission was the conflation of the hagiography in the most canonical collection by Jacobus de Voragine (The Golden Legend), who in turn drew from previous collectors, such as Bartolomeo da Trento and Jean de Mailly. Another section of the paper examines the reception of the legend of the Archangel in a sub-genre of Renaissance Latin poetry, the Fasti Christiani, of which the best exponents are Lorenzo Bonincontri, Ludovico Lazzarelli, Ambrogio Fracco and Girolamo Chiaravacci.