The Material Culture Of Domestic Religion In Early Modern Florence C1480 C1650 Caroline Corisande Anderson by Caroline Corisande Anderson instant download after payment.

The thesis argues the importance that religion, space, and material culture held in shaping the identity of the Catholic domestic sphere and the inhabitants it housed. The significance and value of domestic religious items (such as acquasantiere and common devotional texts) and spaces (such as the domestic oratory) have for the most part been ignored by histories that have largely written the Catholic home as secular and art histories whose focus has been confined to a restricted understanding of what constitutes art. This thesis therefore seeks to redress this lack of research by providing a sustained and more empirically based investigation into an aspect of material history whose significance is little understood.
By charting the rising presence of devotional items, furniture, images, relics, texts, and spaces in Florentine homes from the late-fifteenth century to the mid-seventeenth, the thesis questions what it might mean to have religion so ubiquitous at home at a specific historical juncture and analyses shifts in belief through the ways in which Catholicism was consumed. It posits that everyday devotional objects and, for the Florentine elite, the architectural space of the domestic oratory or chapel provided a fundamental role in structuring not just access to the divine, but also wider social and religious relationships. As such, the thesis asserts both the importance of the
religious dimension to studies of domestic life and the centrality of the concept of the holy home to early modem Catholicism.