ABSTRACT
This chapter surveys the scholarship and proposes a new direction for research to bring forward an understanding of the domestic sphere in early modern religious practice that pushes beyond confessional arguments. Two examples of current research on sixteenth-century Naples and seventeenth-century Prague show that the home was more than just a passive setting. A home of a peasant or artisan would have been very different from that of a nobleman or noblewoman who may have had a private chapel. As the historiographical survey shows, the view that Protestantism alone led to the ‘spiritualization of the home’ no longer holds steady. Scholarly studies both from across the period and of different geographical and confessional areas have shown the variety of ways in which the early modern home could act as a religious space.
