The Sacred Home in Renaissance Italy [Hardcover]

The Sacred Home in Renaissance Italyexplores 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 Homeinvestigates 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 Homeoffers unprecedented glimpses through the keyhole into the spiritual lives of Renaissance Italians.

Introduction
1. Regional perspectives
2. House and home
3. Prayer and meditation
4. Sacred Stuff
5. Reading at home
6. The Devotional Eye
7. Printing and Piety
8. Miracles
9. Thresholds
Conclusion

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 powerl‡