The thesis argues the importance that religion, space, and material culture held in shaping the identity of the Catholic domestic sphere and the inhabitants it housed. The significance and value of domestic religious items (such as acquasantiere and common devotional texts) and spaces (such as the domestic oratory) have for the most part been ignored by histories that have largely written the Catholic home as secular and art histories whose focus has been confined to a restricted understanding of what constitutes art. This thesis therefore seeks to redress this lack of research by providing a sustained and more empirically based investigation into an aspect of material history whose significance is little understood.