Author: Abigail Brundin File Type: pdf The Sacred Home in Renaissance Italy explores the rich devotional life of the Italian household between 1450 and 1600. Rejecting the enduring stereotype of the Renaissance as a secular age, this interdisciplinary study reveals the home to have been an important site of spiritual revitalization. Books, buildings, objects, spaces, images, and archival sources are scrutinized to cast new light on the many ways in which religion infused daily life within thehousehold. Acts of devotion, from routine prayers to extraordinary religious experiences such as miracles and visions, frequently took place at home amid the joys and trials of domestic life from childbirth and marriage to sickness and death. Breaking free from the usual focus on Venice, Florence, and Rome, The Sacred Home investigates practices of piety across the Italian peninsula, with particular attention paid to the city of Naples, the Marche, and the Venetian mainland. It also looks beyond the elite to consider artisanal and lower-status households, and reveals gender and age as factors that powerfully conditioned religious experience. Recovering a host of lost voices and compelling narratives at the intersection between the divine and the everyday, The Sacred Home offers unprecedented glimpses through the keyhole into the spiritual lives of Renaissance Italians. **About the Author Abigail Brundin specialises in the literature and culture of Italy in the renaissance and early modern periods. She has published on women writers in the first age of print, on literature and religious reform, including censorship and the first Indexes of Prohibited Books, and on poetry in and around convents. She has taught at the University of Cambridge since 2002 and as of 2017 is Chair of the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages. Deborah Howard is an architectural historian whose principal research interests include the art and architecture of Venice and the Veneto music and architecture in the Renaissance and the relationship between Italy and the Eastern Mediterranean. A graduate of Cambridge University and the Courtauld Institute of Art, she taught at University College London, Edinburgh University, and the Courtauld Institute, before returning to Cambridge in 1992. She was the Head of the Department of History of Art in Cambridge from 2002-2006 and 2007-2009. Mary Laven is an early modern historian, who has published widely on the social and cultural history of religion. She is the author of Virgins of Venice Enclosed Lives and Broken Vows in the Renaissance Convent (2002) and Mission to China Matteo Ricci and the Jesuit Encounter with the East (2011). More recently, her attention has turned to material culture and she has been involved in two major exhibition projects at the Fitzwilliam Museum. She has taught at the University of Cambridge and Jesus College since 1997.

Author: Kimiaki Tanaka File Type: epub Everyones heard of mandalas now we have a uniquely rich history and explanation of their history and meaning. This book is a history of the genesis and development of the mandala from the fifth and sixth centuries, when the mandala first appeared in India, to the eleventh century, when the Kalacakratantra appeared just before the disappearance of Buddhism in India. The 600 years of Indian esoteric Buddhism that concluded the 1,700-year history of Indian Buddhism could be said to have been the history of the development of the mandala. (The Kalacakratantra integrated earlier mandala theories into a single system and established a monumental system unprecedented in the history of esoteric Buddhism. It was thus the culmination of the development of Indian Buddhism over a period of 1,700 years.) The analysis is at the micro level and includes numerous illustrations and charts. Particular attention is paid to proper names, mudras, and mantras that have been overlooked by scholars in philosophy and doctrine, and the author tackles issues that cannot be explained solely from a historical viewpoint, such as geometric patterns, the arrangement of deities, the colors, and their meaning in Buddhist doctrine. **About the Author Dr. Kimiaki Tanaka (b. 1955) studied Indian philosophy and Sanskrit philology at the University of Tokyo and received his doctorate in 2008 for his dissertation entitled Genesis and Development of the Mandala in India. He also studied abroad as a visiting research fellow at the Nepal Research Centre in Kathmandu (198889) and held a Spalding Visiting Fellowship at the University of Oxford (Wolfson College) in 1993. He has taught at several universities in Japan, as well as conducted fieldwork in India, Nepal, and Tibet. From 1997 to 2015 he was academic consultant for the Hahn Cultural Foundation (Seoul), and he is also chief curator of the Toga Meditation Museum in Toyama prefecture, Japan, and vice-president of the Tibet Culture Centre International in Tokyo. He has published more than 50 books and 120 articles on esoteric Buddhism, Buddhist iconography, and Tibetan art. He is currently a lecturer at the Toho Gakuin, Keio University, and Toyo University.