Divine Domesticity: Augustine of Thagaste to Teresa of Avila (Studies in the History of Christian Thought)

Providing a cultural history of the home between the 4th and 16th centuries AD, this study investigates the traditional belief in the divine indwelling. The author's method is to research the actualities of housing, and she asks what believers experienced about habitat, its relationships, and its rooms. Four cultural constructs of dwelling are examined: the inn, the sanctuary, the villa, and the castle. The focus is on the hearth as the familial place. Exposing the rejection of the divine in indwelling as at home (John 14.23), the author discovers a fundamental disparity between domesticity and asceticism that dominated Western civilization.