Contested Devotions: Space, Identities and Religious Dissent in the Apothecary’s Home

Abstract

The wave of religious reform that swept Italy in the first half of the sixteenth century challenged Catholic institutions, dogmas, ceremonies and everyday religious life in an unprecedented way. Mingled with the influence of Erasmus and northern Protestantism, it mobilised people regardless of class, gender or educational status to express their religious needs and to interpret the meaning of the sacred for themselves, wishing to ‘live according to their own brains’,1 to ‘pray quietly at home’ with no need for ‘decorated altars and sounding bells of the material churches,’ as some of them declared.2 Well before the events of the Reformation, the laity turned their homes into a refuge from the devotional formalism of the institutional Church. While often inspired by civic cults and other forms of communal piety, the laity actively and creatively interpreted their relation to the divine in the domestic sphere.3 But as confessional lines hardened in the wake of the Council of Trent (1545–1563), a concern for inward-looking spirituality, domesticity, solitude and isolation often turned into necessity. Thus when in 1575 the Venetian apothecary Silvestro Gemma shut the door of his pharmacy to isolate himself from the sound of the litanies and drama of the Corpus Christi procession, which