Domestic devotions in the early modern world

Abstract

In recent decades, a wealth of publications has examined the role of religion in early modern society, culture and politics. This includes pioneering work on the importance of lay piety to civic identity in the Renaissance period.1 Many more studies have focused on the upheavals associated with the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, and in the last thirty years historians of Protestant Europe have expanded their focus to include the family and the home within studies of religious change.2 However, the focus on the intimate and medita- tive nature of Lutheranism, Calvinism and Anglicanism, has tended to distract historians from gaining a proper understanding of those cultural formations that were simultaneously also present in Catholic homes. The same histo- riographical tradition, emerging from Reformation studies, has been even slower to forge comparisons with regions outside Europe and faiths beyond Christianity. Given the vast array of religious beliefs and practices throughout the early modern world and bearing in mind their distinct patterns of histori- cal evolution, it is evident that a one-size-fits-all model of comparison will not serve to explain what domestic – or private – piety is. We are equally con- scious that the use of a European periodization in a global perspective is not unproblematic. However, we are emboldened by the fact that historians of East Asia have recognized the value of adopting terms and appropriating concepts from the western historiographical tradition. For example, Craig Clunas has experimented with the idea of a Burckhardtian Renaissance in relation to Ming China, while Kai-Wing Chow argues forcibly for the relevance of ‘early modern’ in his study of print culture in China.