The Sacred Home in Renaissance Italy

by Abigail Brundin, Deborah Howard, Mary Laven

Overview

The Sacred Home in Renaissance Italy explores the rich devotional life of the Italian household between 1450 and 1600. Rejecting the enduring stereotype of the Renaissance as a secular age, this interdisciplinary study reveals the home to have been an important site of spiritual revitalization. Books, buildings, objects, spaces, images, and archival sources are scrutinized to cast new light on the many ways in which religion infused daily life within the household. Acts of devotion, from routine prayers to extraordinary religious experiences such as miracles and visions, frequently took place at home amid the joys and trials of domestic life — from childbirth and marriage to sickness and death.

Breaking free from the usual focus on Venice, Florence, and Rome, The Sacred Home investigates practices of piety across the Italian peninsula, with particular attention paid to the city of Naples, the Marche, and the Venetian mainland. It also looks beyond the elite to consider artisanal and lower-status households, and reveals gender and age as factors that powerfully conditioned religious experience. Recovering a host of lost voices and compelling narratives at the intersection between the divine and the everyday, The Sacred Home offers unprecedented glimpses through the keyhole into the spiritual lives of Renaissance Italians.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198816553
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	09/19/2018
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	810,454
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Abigail Brundin specialises in the literature and culture of Italy in the renaissance and early modern periods. She has published on women writers in the first age of print, on literature and religious reform, including censorship and the first Indexes of Prohibited Books, and on poetry in and around convents. She has taught at the University of Cambridge since 2002 and as of 2017 is Chair of the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages.


Deborah Howard is an architectural historian whose principal research interests include: the art and architecture of Venice and the Veneto; music and architecture in the Renaissance; and the relationship between Italy and the Eastern Mediterranean. A graduate of Cambridge University and the Courtauld Institute of Art, she taught at University College London, Edinburgh University, and the Courtauld Institute, before returning to Cambridge in 1992. She was the Head of the Department of History of Art in Cambridge from 2002-2006 and 2007-2009.

Mary Laven is an early modern historian, who has published widely on the social and cultural history of religion. She is the author of Virgins of Venice: Enclosed Lives and Broken Vows in the Renaissance Convent (2002) and Mission to China: Matteo Ricci and the Jesuit Encounter with the East (2011). More recently, her attention has turned to material culture and she has been involved in two major exhibition projects at the Fitzwilliam Museum. She has taught at the University of Cambridge and Jesus College since 1997.

Table of Contents

Introduction1. Regional perspectives2. House and home3. Prayer and meditation4. Sacred Stuff5. Reading at home6. The Devotional Eye7. Printing and Piety8. Miracles9. ThresholdsConclusion

Editorial Reviews

"The Sacred Home in Renaissance Italy articulates the thesis of a "domestication" of lay devotion with panache and will surely remain an indispensable guide. It will fall to future scholarship to integrate its insights more fully with the social and institutional contexts that conditioned domestic religion. In the end, the term "Renaissance religion" may be too limited or imprecise to capture the complexities of an era of cultural conflict and political transformation." — Wietse de Boer, Journal of Modern History

"This study is both enlightening and encouraging in its use of familiar and unfamiliar resources, and shows how to draw compelling conclusions from difficult questions." — Jennifer Mara Desilva, Ball State University, Comptes Rendus

"The amount of material in the book is astonishing ... Brundin, Howard and Laven consciously seek to compensate for long-standing blind spots in Italian Renaissance scholarship. They investigate rural as well as urban areas, indigents as well as elites, local artists from foreign backgrounds, men as well as women (especially important in a book about domestic life) ... The grat power of material objects lies in their capacity to encompass multiple uses and meanings, to cross boundaries, to embrace contradictions. The book shines most when it draws these out." — Emily Michelson, Times Higher Education Supplement

"This is an impressive book, the product of a substantial research project conducted by a team of scholars, and it demonstrates the value of collaborative work in fields that do not often undertake it. By combining their and their postdoctoral fellows' research expertise in Italian literature, art history, and history, and linguistic skills in several Italian dialects, they have created a wide-ranging study of domestic devotion in the Venetian terrafirma, the Marche, and Naples." — Celeste McNamara, The Catholic Historical Review

From the Publisher