The Ex Voto between Domestic and Public Space: From Personal Testimony to Collective Memory

Holy pictures for the house; modes of prayer recommended for use in the privacy of the chamber; vernacular religious texts for lay consumption: these leave no doubt of the perceived significance of the home as a place of Christian devotion during the Renaissance. To privilege the domestic context of Renaissance religion, which is the purpose of the present volume, is to bring welcome light to neglected evidence of spirituality within the household. At the same time, however, the focus of attention on the domestic environment should not be taken to imply a separation of spheres. It is a premise of the essay which follows that there was no form of devotion in the home which did not find its meaning in a larger context of shared identity and belief. The Italian Renaissance casa, at different social levels, comprised diverse social groups, economic activities, and functional locations, and this complexity blurred the boundary between domestic and communal or social spaces. The household was at once the site of both the ‘personal’ and the ‘public’; and its individual members were equally multifaceted. This point matters, because to give particular attention and priority to evidence of religious behaviour within the home is to risk polarising the historical picture – or rather, since the polarisation is already present, to exacerbate the problem. The original rhetoric of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation established a supposedly fundamental contrast between the Lutheran householder and his wife, at home, in intimate conversation with the deity, and an unthinking herd of Catholic parishioners gathered, in church, in passive incomprehension of a collective liturgy. Negative accounts of the pre-Reformation Church – influenced by Counter-Reformation Catholic no less than Protestant critiques – have been extensively dismantled by recent scholarship, yet the effect of the confessional debates of the sixteenth century is still evident in the divergent directions taken by recent and current research. Some years ago, André Vauchez drew a categorical distinction between two separate and ‘contrary’ traditions, respectively of the public cult of the saints