The Sacred Home in Renaissance Italy

The Sacred Home in Renaissance Italy explores private devotional life in the Italian Renaissance home between 1400 and 1600, and suggests that piety was not confined to the church and the convent but infused daily life within the household. Books, buildings, objects, spaces, images, and archival sources help to cast light on the role of religion in the home. 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--childbirth, marriage, infertility, sickness, accidents, poverty, and death.

The study moves beyond traditional research on the Renaissance in important ways. Firstly, it breaks free from the usual focus on Venice, Florence, and Rome to investigate practices of piety across the Italian peninsula. In particular, new research into the city of Naples, the Marche, and the Venetian mainland offers fresh insights into the devotional life of the laity. Moreover, it goes beyond the study of elites to include artisanal and lower-status households, and reveals gender and age as factors that powerfully conditioned religious experience. Drawing on a wide range of textual, material, and visual sources, this book recovers a host of lost voices and compelling narratives at the intersection between the divine and the everyday. Its multidisciplinary approach enables unprecedented glimpses through the key-hole into the spiritual lives of Renaissance Italians.

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.