The Sacred Home in Renaissance Italy
Deborah Howard author Mary Laven author Abigail Brundin author
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press
Published:19th Jul '18
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
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.
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 *
- Winner of Honorable Mention from the 2020 Society for Renaissance Studies Biennial Book Prize Winner of the 2019 Roland H. Bainton Prize for History and Theology.
ISBN: 9780198816553
Dimensions: 242mm x 163mm x 30mm
Weight: 888g
432 pages