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

Why did nineteenth-century historians rarely analyze the artifacts, practices, and spaces of domestic religious devotion in Renaissance Italy? Two sets of assumptions underlie this large lacuna: one, the belief that women and women's things (the domestic) are trivial and not worth bothering about (misogyny), and two, religion as pure superstition merited disdain rather than study (secularism). To the contrary, people in early modern Italy viewed things quite differently.

In a singular, powerful study, the authors of The Sacred Home in Renaissance Italy demonstrate just how deeply religious devotion penetrated, or better, characterized, domestic life at all social levels, from peasants to the nobility. In the process they persuasively dismiss nineteenth-century historians' perception of Italy as largely secular. Rather than pursue the well-trod terrain of Rome, Florence, and Venice, the authors turn to secondary centers in the Marche, the Veneto, and Naples as emblematic sources. Here they document practices and products, rituals and reading, and a wide range of artifacts, from lintels over portals to framed images and home altars.

Notoriously difficult to assess, private piety nonetheless surfaces in a range of sources, and I mean surfaces quite literally. Evidence of domestic devotion emerges only as a result of exhaustive research, not only of documents, but of narratives, or of early modern books, where a reference or two might cast light on a hitherto unknown practice, or in an ex-voto, where a single cheap image does the same. The authors undertook precisely this type of dogged effort, for the sources yield information only after long and careful culling of myriad needles in ancient haystacks, some of which do not appear initially to hold promise. The results are refreshing and intriguing, with the pious home both an enclosed and private space and an environment permeated by and spilling out into the larger community.

Setting out from a brief introduction to the three regions, the authors first examine the homes of different social classes, from the rural to the princely palace, as well as sites such as foreign living quarters for merchants and even quarters on board ships. The titled might have a private oratory to celebrate mass, but more commonly the upper classes outfitted a private altar with priedieu, sacred images, and candles, while for lower classes, printers and artisans produced cheap prints and trinkets, as the authors suggest, to replicate the domestic environment of the Holy Family itself in their own homes. Exactly where and how prayer and meditation took place is the subject of the following chapter. Advice literature likened preparation for prayer to that of a woman preparing her toilette, or that of a musician tuning his instrument before a performance, so as not to "meet God spiritually unadorned" (82). Literature for women advising how to set up a house for prayer linked each phase (penitence, virtues, prayers for special days) to garments familiar to women, as they prayed and read sacred texts. A single image, a bowl of holy water and the sign of the cross could render even the most humble abode a sacred site for prayer. Voices raised to repeat standard prayers, the clacking of rosary beads, church bells tolling at regular intervals added an all-important aural dimension to the spaces and the ongoing devotions, even if mental prayer also acquired increasing significance over the course of the sixteenth century.

From the practices and places of piety, the authors turn their attention to the artifacts and items that adorned them, relying primarily on postmortem inventories, dowry contracts, and pawn shop and publisher registers, duly recorded by notaries. Rosary beads, tin figures, wax for candles, psalters, coral, votive figures, often brought home from important shrines such as the Santa Casa of Loreto, could be carried in a pocket but also displayed in the home. As the authors note, the line between superstition and orthodox religion often blurred, as many of the items seem to have been used as...