Professor Abigail Brundin

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, on poetry in and around convents, and on devotional culture of the home.

Prof Brundin was one of the three Principal Investigators of the groundbreaking interdisciplinary project Domestic Devotions: The Place of Piety in the Italian Renaissance Home, 1400-1600. The project gave rise to a major exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum: Madonnas and Miracles: the Holy Home in Renaissance Italy. The project book, co-authored by the three PIs, is published by OUP: The Sacred Home in Renaissance Italy. The book won the Bainton Prize for History/Theology, and Honorable Mention for the Society for Renaissance Studies Book Prize.

She also collaborates regularly with the National Trust and English Heritage to work on historic libraries in English country houses.

Professor of Italian

Professor Abigail Brundin is has been a lecturer in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics since 2003, and a Fellow of St Catharine's College since 2000.

Professor 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, beginning with Vittoria Colonna, on literature and religious reform, on poetry in and around convents, on cultures of reading and the devotional culture of the home. She has collaborated with the National Trust and English Heritage to bring the historic library collections in English country houses into the visitor experience through exhibitions and publications. 

Brundin's pioneering collaborative investigation into the forms and function of religious devotion in the home, Domestic Devotions: The Place of Piety in the Italian Renaissance Home, 1400-1600, was funded by a Synergy Grant of £2.4m from the European Research Council and led to a major exhibition, Madonnas and Miracles: the Holy Home in Renaissance Italy, as well as a monograph: The Sacred Home in Renaissance Italy. 

Professor Brundin is on the steering committee of the Cambridge Centre for Material Texts.

• Vittoria Colonna, Selected Letters, ed. and trans. Abigail Brundin and Veronica Copello (Toronto: Iter and ACMRS Press, in press)
• Abigail Brundin, Deborah Howard, Mary Laven, The Sacred Home in Renaissance Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), xxv + 366pp. Winner of the Bainton Prize 2018.
• Companion to Vittoria Colonna, ed. Abigail Brundin, Tatiana Crivelli Speciale and Maria Serena Sapegno (Brill, forthcoming 2015)
• Forms of Faith in Sixteenth-Century Italy, ed. Abigail Brundin and Matthew Treherne (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009)
• Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation, Catholic Christendom 1200-1650 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008)
• Vittoria Colonna, Sonnets for Michelangelo, ed. and trans. Abigail Brundin. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2005)
• The Brownlows in Italy: Books and Continental Travel, exhibition of books at Belton House, Lincs (National Trust), curated by Abigail Brundin with Dunstan Roberts, 2 March to 3 November 2013

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