Vernacular Books and Domestic Devotion in Cinquecento Italy
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Marco Faini
Abstract
From the fifteenth century onwards, devotional texts represented a prominent part of the output of the Italian printing press. Much of this production, which often represented a privileged way to access the biblical text, is still largely unexplored. My article will analyse a selection of devotional writings printed at the end of the fifteenth century and in the first three decades of the sixteenth century that were directed to a large audience of laymen and women of medium to low literacy. I will analyse how these texts entered the domestic devotional practices of Italian devotees, focussing especially on reading. I will take into account their suggestions about how, when, and by whom reading should be performed; what readings devotees were encouraged to pursue; how the ideal reader was shaped in the paratextual apparatuses; and, finally, what textual tools the readers were offered to perform their reading practices.
© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Bibles in the Hands of Readers: Dutch, English, French, and Italian Perspectives
- Articles
- Shaping Religious Reading Cultures in the Early Modern Netherlands: The “Glossed Bibles” of Jacob van Liesvelt and Willem Vorsterman (1532–1534ff.)
- The Quest for the Early Modern Bible Reader: The Dutch Vorsterman Bible (1533–1534), its Readers and Users
- Framing Biblical Reading Practices: The Impact of the Paratext of Jacob van Liesvelt’s Bibles (1522–1545)
- The Elizabethan Catholic New Testament and Its Readers
- Manual Labour and Biblical Reading in Late Medieval France
- Vernacular Books and Domestic Devotion in Cinquecento Italy
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Bibles in the Hands of Readers: Dutch, English, French, and Italian Perspectives
- Articles
- Shaping Religious Reading Cultures in the Early Modern Netherlands: The “Glossed Bibles” of Jacob van Liesvelt and Willem Vorsterman (1532–1534ff.)
- The Quest for the Early Modern Bible Reader: The Dutch Vorsterman Bible (1533–1534), its Readers and Users
- Framing Biblical Reading Practices: The Impact of the Paratext of Jacob van Liesvelt’s Bibles (1522–1545)
- The Elizabethan Catholic New Testament and Its Readers
- Manual Labour and Biblical Reading in Late Medieval France
- Vernacular Books and Domestic Devotion in Cinquecento Italy
