The Sacred Home in Renaissance Italy by Abigail Brundin, Deborah Howard, and Mary Laven (review)

In The Sacred Home in Renaissance Italy, Abigail Brundin, Deborah Howard, and Mary Laven, three eminent scholars of early modern Italy, argue convincingly for the vitality of a "Renaissance" religion that was centered in the domestic sphere. 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.

The authors set out to make several key interventions, in many cases breaking out of tired trends in the scholarship. Rather than focus on the major urban areas that have long been the area of focus for Italianists, they join a growing group of scholars looking to the more ignored "peripheral" territories (Naples, while an incredibly vibrant and populated place, has nonetheless been understudied and thus still qualifies as peripheral in anglophone scholarship). Rather than seeing the religious history of sixteenth-century Italy as a "failed Reformation," they argue for the renewal of spirituality across a broader period, covering 1450-1600. It is for this reason that they consciously use the term "Renaissance" rather than the blander but less contentious "early modern." Not only do they reject the Reformation as a key breaking point, but they wish to demonstrate that even quotidian devotion benefitted from the spirit of creativity that imbued the Italian Renaissance. Their focus on domestic devotions, and in particular on the material aspects of it, also allows them to make two other interventions. First, their wide range of sources (visual, material, textual, architectural, and archival) and their theoretically sophisticated method of analysis allows them to access the realms of devotion not only of the elites but also of fairly ordinary Italian citizens. We often get a glimpse into their religious lives only when they ran afoul of some authority, so the ability to better understand their devotional practices is invaluable. Second, the authors found such a wealth of material objects that they can expand upon arguments about the burgeoning consumer culture of Renaissance Italy. Although shopping and conspicuous consumption are often assumed to be primarily secular activities, this book clearly demonstrates that materialism spread to the realm of devotion, and that devotional items had complex meanings within the home. A religious image or statue, for example, could represent a real saintly presence who lived with the family, and the household's human residents might lavish it with physical and verbal affection. At the same time, rosaries, crosses, and other small devotional objects would be listed in household inventories along with other types of jewelry and could be pawned just as easily as secular objects when the owner was short on funds.

This is a book that accomplishes a great deal in its roughly three hundred pages, but perhaps the most significant contribution is to argue against the idea that it is the Protestant faiths alone that provided early modern Christians with a more personal and individual path to spirituality. Protestants had the Bible, access to which was denied to most Catholics. But as Brundin, Howard, and Laven demonstrate, Catholics had devotional books and pamphlets, images, statues, inscriptions, music, beads and figurines, and even household altars, all of which could be used in ways that were both familiar and Church-approved and yet intensely personal and individualistic.