Images and Words in Exile

At the beginning of the 14th century, far-reaching political events and social transformations rapidly changed the set-up of the Mediterranean basin and affected the Ordo universalis through which the material and symbolic space of Christianitas had been previously conceived. The essays collected in this volume discuss this historical transition by adopting the lens of "exile", a long-lasting and intrinsically polysemic notion that experienced a new actuality in those decades.

Far beyond the topos of the Avignon papacy as a new Babylonian Captivity,the volume examines practices and representations of exclusion, selfexclusion, and mobility, in their sociohistorical as well as cultural and artistic manifestations, as different and yet intertwined attempts to redefine universal, local, and individual identities.