The Sacred Home in Renaissance Italy

Abigail Brundin specializes in the literature and culture of Renaissance and Early Modern Italy. She has written on many aspects of the period, from female convents to the Grand Tour, and is above all known for her work on the poet Vittoria Colonna, as the translator of the Sonnets for Michelangelo (2005) and author of Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation (2008). A Fellow of St Catharine's College, she has taught at the University of Cambridge since 2002 and is currently chair of the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages. Deborah Howard is an architectural historian whose principal research interests revolve around the art and architecture of Venice and the Veneto, seen from an interdisciplinary perspective. Her books include Venice & the East (2000), Sound & Space in Renaissance Venice (2009, with L. Moretti) and Venice Disputed (2013). She is a Professor Emerita at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of St John's College. She was elected to the British Academy in 2010. Mary Laven 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 is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Jesus College.

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