Tigre e le "Dei famulae" dell’Italia altomedievale: presenze femminili tra pratiche di ospitalità e spazi di accoglienza

The essay has as its starting point a 10th-century hagiographical text about an otherwise unknown female figure, Saint Tigris, who leads a withdrawn life in Moriana, in the northwestern Alps, together with her sister Pimenia. The story narrated by the Vita, little studied until recent years, is set in the 6th century and revolves around the most important moment in the history of the Dei famula, namely a journey to the eastern Mediterranean in search of the Baptist’s relics. From those lands, Tigris managed to bring back the remains of the Precursor’s body, around which the new diocese of Moriana (Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne) was created. This reconfiguration of jurisdictional arrangements in the ecclesiastical sphere led, during the early Middle Ages and beyond, to a complex interweaving of territorial claims between the archdiocese of Vienne, the diocese of Moriana and that of Turin, and is at the basis of the drafting of the hagiographic text. It, however, also shows another aspect of the life led by the two sisters, which is relevant because it is closely linked to Tigris's journey to the East, namely the practice of hospitality, in an area affected by long-distance roads, linked to the Alpine passes. The paper focuses on this theme in particular, investigating the forms of a ‘domestic’ hospitality, practised within family contexts, in which women who embraced an ascetic life played a prominent role, alone or together with their male relatives, who adhered to the same existential choice. The case of Tigris and Pimenia, from this specific perspective, is thus placed within a broader framework, highlighting the Late Antique ‘models’ of the phenomenon as well as looking at the Early Medieval Italian context.