Vittoria Colonna and the
Spiritual Poetics of the
Italian Reformation
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Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Brundin, Abigail
Vittoria Colonna and the spiritual poetics of the Italian Reformation. – (Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700) 1. Colonna, Vittoria, 1492–1547 – Criticism and interpretation 2. Italian poetry – 16th century – History and criticism 3. Christian poetry, Italian – History and criticism 4. Petrarchism 5. Neoplatonism in literature
I. Title 851.4’09
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brundin, Abigail.
Vittoria Colonna and the spiritual poetics of the Italian Reformation / by Abigail Brundin.
p. cm. – (Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-4049-3 (alk. paper)
1. Colonna, Vittoria, 1492-1547–Criticism and interpretation. 2. Italian poetry–15th century–History and criticism. 3. Christian poetry, Italian–History and criticism. I. Title. PQ4620.B78 2008
851’.3–dc22
2007030167
ISBN 978 0 7546 4049 3
Contents
Series Editor’s Preface vii
Preface ix
Acknowledgements xv
Introduction Petrarchism, Neo-Platonism and Reform 1
1 The Making of a Renaissance Publishing Phenomenon 15
2 The Influence of Reform 37
3 The Canzoniere Spirituale for Michelangelo Buonarroti 67
4 The Gift Manuscript for Marguerite de Navarre 101
5 Marian Prose Works 133
6 Colonna’s Readers: The Reception of Reformed Petrarchism 155
7 The Fate of the Canzoniere Spirituale 171
Conclusion 191
Bibliography 193
Series Editor’s Preface
The still-usual emphasis on medieval (or Catholic) and reformation (or Protestant) religious history has meant neglect of the middle ground, both chronological and ideological. As a result, continuities between the middle ages and early modern Europe have been overlooked in favor of emphasis on radical discontinuities. Further, especially in the later period, the identification of ‘reformation’ with various kinds of Protestantism means that the vitality and creativity of the established church, whether in its Roman or local manifestations, has been left out of account. In the last few years, an upsurge of interest in the history of traditional (or catholic) religion makes these inadequacies in received scholarship even more glaring and in need of systematic correction. The series will attempt this by covering all varieties of religious behavior, broadly interpreted, not just (or even especially) traditional institutional and doctrinal church history. It will to the maximum degree possible be interdisciplinary, comparative and global, as well as non-confessional. The goal is to understand religion, primarily of the ‘Catholic’ variety, as a broadly human phenomenon, rather than as a privileged mode of access to superhuman realms, even implicitly.
The period covered, 1300–1700, embraces the moment which saw an almost complete transformation of the place of religion in the life of Europeans, whether considered as a system of beliefs, as an institution, or as a set of social and cultural practices. In 1300, vast numbers of Europeans, from the pope down, fully expected Jesus’s return and the beginning of His reign on earth. By 1700, very few Europeans, of whatever level of education, would have subscribed to such chiliastic beliefs. Pierre Bayle’s notorious sarcasms about signs and portents are not idiosyncratic. Likewise, in 1300 the vast majority of Europeans probably regarded the pope as their spiritual head; the institution he headed was probably the most tightly integrated and effective bureaucracy in Europe. Most Europeans were at least nominally Christian, and the pope had at least nominal knowledge of that fact. The papacy, as an institution, played a central role in high politics, and the clergy in general formed an integral part of most governments, whether central or local. By 1700, Europe was divided into a myriad of different religious allegiances, and even those areas officially subordinate to the pope were both more nominally Catholic in belief (despite colossal efforts at imposing uniformity) and also in allegiance than they had been four hundred years earlier. The pope had become only one political factor, and not one of the first rank. The clergy, for its part, had virtually disappeared from secular governments as well as losing much of its local authority. The stage was set for the Enlightenment.
Preface
It is the particular fate of women writers of the Renaissance period across all the nations of Europe, as recent scholarship has cogently emphasised, to suffer from a ‘weak history’, that is the tendency to disappear almost completely from the canon of recognised writers after a relatively short period of fame and literary acclaim.1 No matter how great the literary status of the writer
in question during their brief flowering, few seem to have been immune to this frustrating phenomenon. The reasons for the historical erasure of such writers are various and subtle, with at their heart the persistent tendency to read women’s writing in a ruthlessly biographical vein which serves to dehistoricise it and undermine its literary status, alongside the consideration of such minority voices as ‘curiosities’ to be assembled in marvellous collections that are not considered serious or lasting.2
In setting out to write a book-length study in English of Vittoria Colonna, whose fame and literary standing in her own era were unquestioned, one is confronted with precisely this situation. On the one hand, scholarly accounts of the period almost universally acknowledge Colonna’s importance as a literary figure, one of the primary means by which the linguistic and Petrarchan ideals concretised in the early decades of the sixteenth century by Pietro Bembo filtered further south, a political intermediary, a religious reformer, and also, more problematically, as a lone female voice in a male-dominated cultural arena. On the other hand, such acknowledgement has failed to translate into a serious monograph about this highly interesting and important individual, but rather she has continually been assigned a subsidiary role in the account of the lives of the powerful men she knew.3 In relation to these men Colonna’s role
is a passive one: she is a muse, or else a pupil characterised as possessing an absorbent and receptive mind but little originality or intellectual acuity of her own. Due presumably to her perceived mainstream status, she has remained relatively untouched by the wave of feminist-inspired literary criticism that has in the past decades uncovered and re-appropriated so many forgotten female
1 The phrase is borrowed from the useful volume on this phenomenon, Strong
Voices, Weak History: Early Women Writers and Canons in England, France, and Italy, ed. by Pamela J. Benson and Victoria Kirkham (Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press, 2005).
2 On this latter tendency, see the essay by Deana Shemek, ‘The Collector’s Cabinet:
Lodovico Domenichi’s Gallery of Women’, in Benson and Kirkham, eds, Strong Voices, Weak History, pp. 239–62.
3 The most recent monograph in English devoted to Colonna is Maude Jerrold,
Vittoria Colonna, Her Friends and Her Times (New York: Freeport, 1906). The persistency of this tendency into very recent history is exemplified by the title of the
1997 exhibition on Colonna that was held at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna:
Vittoria Colonna, Dichterin und Muse Michelangelos. The suggestion is that Colonna
would not have been an interesting enough subject in her own right without the reflected
voices from the Renaissance period. Thus despite the clear recognition of her centrality as a role model for later women writers in Italy, Colonna’s history and contribution to the literary culture of her age have remained sadly under-appreciated and under-explored. Perhaps it is a case of a mistaken impression, persisting even within the group of scholars with a direct interest in reshaping the canon to include important works by female authors, that Colonna somehow sacrificed something essential in order to be so popular among her contemporaries, that her work is, as a result, dry and unappealing.4
My aim in writing the present volume is therefore first and foremost to redirect attention to Colonna’s work itself, placed firmly in the context that informed it, in order to convey to a wider audience just how interesting and innovative a writer she really was. In order to achieve this end her context, both literary and, crucially, religious, becomes a vital factor informing a reading of the poetic and prose works and pointing us towards a new appreciation of the deeply serious intent behind Colonna’s literary production and its important ramifications for the future development of poetry-writing in Italy after the Council of Trent. It is a surprising fact that, while scholars have always acknowledged Colonna’s close involvement in a consideration of some of the most pressing religious questions of her age, few have brought this knowledge to bear upon their reading of her work. Only by taking into account the centrality of her increasingly ‘reformed’ religion in the composition of Colonna’s literary works can we have any understanding of the aims and intentions underpinning her poetic production. In addition, through such a contextualised study we may better grasp the true nature of the impact of her poetry on its many readers, both the close circle of sympathetic friends who received and responded to her poems and letters throughout her lifetime and the wider public who, through the numerous published editions of her verses produced in the sixteenth century, came to appreciate the beauty and the message of her spiritual Petrarchism. Thus while the focus of my study remains Colonna herself, the highly significant and wholly talented individual who occupied such a special and unprecedented position in the cultural arena of Renaissance Italy, through a consideration of her spiritual poetics I hope to widen the focus of this book in order to contemplate the role of poetry in the Italian reform movement more generally, and thus re-write the history of Renaissance Petrarchism as a more significant, applied and energetic phenomenon than has been allowed by previous centuries of criticism.
A key element of this re-appraisal is precisely an appreciation of the outward-looking, engaged nature of Colonna’s poetic project that marks it out as particularly unusual and innovative in the context of lyric production of the period. One of the most persistent characterisations that has accompanied
4 Fiora Bassanese’s guarded praise is typical: ‘Although essentially mainstream,
the poet through the centuries is that of a dogged Petrarchist of the most conventional kind, faithfully recording her devoted love for her (cad of a) husband in a private memoir that leans heavily on Petrarch, exemplifying through its own limitations the limits of Renaissance literary imitatio when deployed by the less ‘original’ minds of the period. Of course Colonna herself asks us to collude with her in the propagation of this very image, joining in the denigration of the quality and value of her poetry:
Scrivo sol per sfogar l’interna doglia ch’al cor mandar le luci al mondo sole, e non per giunger lume al mio bel Sole, al chiaro spirto e a l’onorata spoglia.
Giusta cagion a lamentar m’invoglia; ch’io scemi la sua Gloria assai mi dole; per altra tromba e più sagge parole convien ch’a morte il gran nome si toglia.5
What I hope to make clear in the following chapters is the mistake we make when we choose to take such claims at face value. As becomes evident through an examination of Colonna’s involvement in the dissemination of her own work and the nature of her relationships with other writers, she was at all times intensely aware of the important connection between her religious beliefs and her poetic production, and took altogether seriously the duty that she had to ensure that the latter was a well-judged response to the former. While she was always careful not to disrupt the public image of pious female humility that allowed her to maintain such a successful presence on the literary scene, she simultaneously worked quietly to ensure that her verses were read by those who could respond in an informed manner to their particular religious messages. There are clear reasons why a pioneering woman writer in this period might choose to collude with the literary conventions and expectations of her age, but that is certainly not all that Vittoria Colonna was doing, as I hope will become clear in the following chapters.
A Brief Defence of Terms
When writing about religious developments in the early decades of the sixteenth century, some uncertainty arises concerning the terminology to be
5 ‘I write solely to relieve the inner anguish / which the only lights in the world
send to my heart / and not to add glory to my radiant Sun, / to his splendid spirit and venerated remains. / I have good reason to lament; / for it grieves me greatly that I might diminish his glory; / another trumpet, and far wiser words than these / would be suited to deprive death of his great name’ (all translations my own unless otherwise stated). For the full text of the sonnet, see Vittoria Colonna, Rime, ed. by Alan Bullock (Rome: Laterza, 1982), p. 3. Bullock divides the sonnets into three sections, amorous, spiritual
used in relation to the groups of reformers active in Italy at this time. Scholars continue to debate the best choice of terms, as well as the correct periodisation of the phenomenon of Italian reform and its precise character.6 In a spirit of
inclusiveness, or perhaps of sitting on the fence, I have chosen in the present study to make use of the range of terms available, including reform, evangelism and the Italian Reformation, without intending any qualitative or significant distinction between them.7 The group of reformers who gather around the
English Cardinal Reginald Pole (1500–1558) in Viterbo are variously the spirituals or the spirituali, the English and Italian terms are used interchangeably. I have avoided using the term ecclesia viterbiensis to refer to the evangelicals in Pole’s household and others (including Colonna) in Viterbo in the early 1540s. Thomas Mayer has provided a convincing case for the need to expand our understanding of the influence of evangelism in Italybeyond Viterbo and the close group of individuals who met there to other groups, cities and locations.8
It seems in any case clear that until the parameters of the phenomenon of Italian reform are better understood, including the presence and religious experiences of a large number of reform minded individuals in Italy until the very end of the sixteenth century, one cannot begin to decide upon the most appropriate choice of terms.9 This book aims to be a small contribution to the ongoing
reassessment of sixteenth-century Italian reform, and seeks to draw vernacular poetry into the heart of the debate by demonstrating its deep engagement with issues of personal and communal spirituality from the late 1530s until the end of the century.
6 For a very useful summary of recent scholarship on this issue, see Olimpia
Morata, The Complete Writings of an Italian Heretic, ed. and trans. by Holt N. Parker (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 47–54. Parker’s analysis includes
a synthesis of the major contributions to scholarly debates about the nature of the Italian reform movement, including those by Firpo, Gleason, Jung, McNair, Schutte
et al. See also, for a discussion of the problem in relation to Reginald Pole, Thomas F. Mayer, Reginald Pole: Prince and Prophet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000), pp. 8–11; and more generally, Mayer, ‘What to Call the Spirituali’, in Chiesa cattolica e mondo moderno: Scritti in onore di Paolo Prodi, ed. by Gianpaolo Brizzi, Adriano Prosperi and Gabriella Zarri (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2007), pp. 11–26.
7 The term ‘evangelism’ is intended in the sense in which it was first defined by
Delio Cantimori, who used the expression to categorise the very particular, Augustinian and humanistic character of the pre-Tridentine reform movement in Italy, with its
strong Savonarolan echoes. See, for a concise overview of Cantimori’s definition, Paolo
Simoncelli, Evangelismo italiano del Cinquecento. Questione religiosa e nicodemismo politico (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per l’età moderna e contemporanea, 1979), pp. vii–xxxii; also Delio Cantimori, Eretici italiani del Cinquecento e altri scritti, ed. by Adriano Prosperi (Turin: Einaudi, 1992), pp. 565–604.
8 Mayer, Reginald Pole, chapter 3, esp. pp. 103–4.
9 A number of scholars have argued for the existence of evangelism in Italy until
the end of the sixteenth century and even into the seventeenth. For a summary of
some of the arguments, see Elisabeth G. Gleason, ‘On the Nature of Sixteenth-Century
I have provided translations (my own unless otherwise stated) of all Italian passages cited in the following chapters. In the case of prose passages, the English translation is given in the main body of the text. In the case of poetry, given the difficulties inherent in translation and the importance of the texts in question for the development of my argument, it seemed more useful to retain the Italian originals in the main body of the text and provide prose translations in footnotes. Poetic texts taken from manuscript sources have been re-punctuated in accordance with modern expectations and to aid comprehension. Biblical citations are taken from the Douay-Rheims version of the Catholic Bible, as a translation directly from Jerome’s Latin vulgate and therefore closer to Vittoria Colonna’s likely source than the King James Bible.
Acknowledgements
During the too-many years that this book has been gestating in various forms, the list of individuals and institutions deserving my heartfelt thanks has grown ever longer. First place on that list belongs rightly to Virginia Cox, who turned me on to Vittoria Colonna all those years ago, and whose expertise, advice and unwavering support over the years helped me to think in new ways and bring new insights to my work that have improved it greatly. A similar vote of thanks must go to Letizia Panizza, always interested, full of knowledge, vocal and active in her support of a younger colleague, and a joyous lunch companion.
Tom Mayer deserves special thanks, firstly for inviting me to contribute to his series, and secondly for his careful and exacting editorial eye. He has helped me to tighten up numerous sections of this book with a historian’s attention to detail, and it is a much better work as a result. Warm thanks to Stephen Bowd for informed attention to drafts of my work, illuminating feedback and an ever-ready sense of humour; also to Barry Collett for his encouragement and insights. Philip Ford and Judith Bryce were both positive and supportive when they encountered this work in its very earliest form. Thanks also to all of the following: Zyg Baránski, Alan Bullock, Yasmin Haskell, Susan Haskins, Dilwyn Knox, Alex Nagel, John Palcewski, Patrick Preston, Brian Richardson, Diana Robin, Lisa Sampson, Olivia Santovetti, Cathy Shrank and Matthew Treherne. My colleagues in the Italian Department at Cambridge, and at St Catharine’s College, are always generous with their knowledge. Raphael Lyne and Miranda Griffin generously helped with translations of Latin and French texts.
I am grateful to a number of publications for permission to reproduce parts of works already in print. Thanks to the British Academy and Oxford University Press for permission to reproduce sections of the Introduction, published as ‘Petrarch and the Italian Reformation’, in Petrarch in Britain: Interpreters, Imitators, and Translators over 700 years, edited by Peter Hainsworth, Martin McLaughlin and Letizia Panizza (Oxford: Oxford University Press and the British Academy, 2007), pp. 131–48. Thanks to Italian Studies and Maney Publishing for permission to reproduce sections of Chapter 3, published as ‘Vittoria Colonna and the Poetry of Reform’, Italian Studies 57 (2002), 61–74. Thanks, finally, to the Modern Language Review and the Modern Humanities Research Association for permission to reproduce sections of Chapter 4, published as ‘Vittoria Colonna and the Virgin Mary’, Modern Language Review 96 (2001), 61–81.
Warm thanks to my editor, Tom Gray, and the staff at Ashgate.
Petrarchism, Neo-Platonism
and Reform
In his essay ‘La letteratura italiana nell’età del Concilio di Trento’, Carlo Dionisotti famously alluded to the link between the growing canon of vernacular literature in Italy in the sixteenth century and the increasingly wide reach and appeal of reformed spirituality.1 A number of scholars
have subsequently traced this connection in a variety of forms and genres. Much work has been done, for example, on the primary evangelical text of the period, the Beneficio di Cristo (first published in 1542 or 1543) which, according to Pier Paolo Vergerio the Younger’s no doubt biased testimony, sold forty thousand copies in Venice alone in the first six years of its circulation before it found itself on Della Casa’s 1549 Index.2 Further evidence of the
close link between literature and reform in the period is furnished by Anne Schutte’s valuable work on Renaissance letter books, demonstrating the evangelising potential of collections of lettere volgari which enjoyed wide circulation and great popularity in the 1540s, and included letters on spiritual subjects by prominent Italian reformers.3 Evidently the evangelising power of
such vernacular texts was sensed and feared by the religious authorities, as is demonstrated most clearly by the vigorous suppression of the Beneficio di
Cristo when the dangerous potential of its poetically charged and uplifting call to arms was quickly recognised.4
A further manifestation of the link between vernacular literature and reformed spirituality in Italy in the sixteenth century, and the potential evangelising role of the former, can be furnished by an examination of the genre of Petrarchism, long considered a ‘closed’ and insular genre, impervious to the influence of the wide world beyond the courtly environment that spawned
1 Carlo Dionisotti, ‘La letteratura italiana nell’età del concilio di Trento’, in
Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1967), pp. 183–204.
2 Vergerio’s comments are cited in Dermot Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience in
Tridentine Italy: Cardinal Pole and the Counter Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 74.
3 Anne Jacobson Schutte, ‘The Lettere Volgari and the Crisis of Evangelism in
Italy’, Renaissance Quarterly 28 (1975), 639–88.
4 For details of the suppression of the text, see Benedetto da Mantova, Il Beneficio
di Cristo con le versioni del secolo XVI, documenti e testimonianze, ed. by Salvatore
Caponetto (Florence: Sansoni, 1972), especially the ‘Nota critica’ (pp. 469–98), and
it.5 How is it that this unlikely genre, famously dismissed by Arturo Graf in
the nineteenth century as ‘a chronic illness of Italian literature’, dry, repetitive and wholly lacking in soul, could come to be directly and seemingly deeply engaged with some of the most significant theological and ideological debates of the period?6 Most crucially, what particular features of the Petrarchan lyric
and the canzoniere format offer themselves to this engagement? Such questions are important if we are to hope to arrive eventually at a more contextualised understanding of the poetry of Vittoria Colonna, and her role as the primary practitioner of such a reformed spiritual poetics.
The fact that there were individuals in the sixteenth century who were simultaneously interested in both reform thought and the composition and critical appreciation of poetry has been noted by other scholars before now. As long ago as 1935, De Biase found intriguing currents of proto-Protestant thought in the commentaries on Dante by Trifone Gabriele (1470–1549) and his pupil Bernardino Daniello (c.1500–1565), providing a fascinating insight into the role played by the second of the ‘tre corone’ of vernacular literature in shaping currents of sixteenth-century evangelism, a role that has been insufficiently explored to date.7 More recently Stephen Bowd, in his book on
the Venetian patrician and reformer Vincenzo Querini (1478–1514), alludes to the involvement in vernacular poetic production of a number of the early reformers in and around Padua and Venice, among them, crucially, Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), chief promoter of Petrarchism in the first half of the sixteenth century. Bowd questions the role played by lyric dabblings in the spiritual programme of such men.8 Thomas Mayer similarly observes the close
marriage of lyricism and spirituality in his book on Reginald Pole, in referring to what he terms ‘the unstable mix of poetry and piety’ characterising the group of spirituali that formed around Pole in the late 1530s and early 1540s,
5 For a discussion of Petrarchism as a ‘closed’ genre, see Thomas M. Greene, The
Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 174–6. See in addition the comments by Lauro Martines,
who sees the genre as creating ‘mini-utopias’ into which the courtier can escape from
problematic realities, in Power and Imagination. City-States in Renaissance Italy, 3rd edn (London: Pimlico, 2002), pp. 323–8 (p. 325).
6 Arturo Graf, Attraverso il Cinquecento (Turin: Chiantore, 1926), vol. 2, p. 3.
Cited in Klaus W. Hempfer, ‘Per una definizione del Petrarchismo’, in Dynamique d’une expansion culturelle. Pétrarque en Europe XIVe–XXe siècle. Actes du XXVIe congrès
international du CEFI, Turin et Chambéry, 11–15 décembre 1995, ed. by Pierre Blanc,
Bibliothèque Franco Simone 30 (Paris: Champion, 2001), pp. 23–52 (p. 24).
7 A. De Biase, ‘Dante e i protestanti nel secolo XVI’, Civiltà Cattolica 86 (1935),
35–46. See also Lino Pertile, ‘Apollonio Merenda, segretario del Bembo, e ventidue
lettere di Trifone Gabriele’, Studi e problemi di critica testuale 34 (1987), 9–48 (pp. 35–7).
8 Stephen D. Bowd, Reform before the Reformation: Vincenzo Querini and
the Religious Renaissance in Italy, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions: History, Culture, Religion, Ideas 87 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 32–45. See also Alessandro
Gnocchi, ‘Tommaso Giustiniani, Ludovico Ariosto e la Compagnia degli Amici’, Studi
which included poets such as Vittoria Colonna and Marcantonio Flaminio (1498–1550) among its number.9 Mayer demonstrates the keen awareness that
Pole himself shows of the potency of the literary gift if turned to the wrong ends, when he congratulates himself on ‘saving’ Marcantonio Flaminio from the heretics, ‘among whom he could have done much damage through the easy and beautiful style which he had of writing Latin and the vernacular’.10 It
is notable too that the Beneficio di Cristo, the primary evangelical vernacular text of this era, is a highly lyrical work and that the poet Flaminio is now widely held to have been at least partially responsible for its authorship.11
Pietro Bembo is a significant figure in any discussion of the particular links between poetry and reform in sixteenth-century Italy. He was of course instrumental in defining the linguistic and thematic goals of the Petrarchan genre in the period and illustrated his theories on language and imitatio through the example of his own lyrics, widely circulated scribally and published in a printed collection for the first time in 1530.12 In addition, Bembo was well
known by many of the key reformers in Italy before Trent, and was frequently referred to as an associate of a number of the spirituali, but also, from 1539 when he was made a cardinal, closely tied to the authorities in Rome.13 Bembo’s
election as a cardinal after a less than pious secular life can be considered to represent on some level a move by Pope Paul III to embrace and absorb the new grandmasters of vernacular literature and culture, so that in the figure of Bembo we find a celebration of the vernacular language and indeed its lyric at the very heart of the religious establishment.14
The preceding brief summary seeks simply to restate and draw together what has already been amply illustrated by scholarship before now: that the movement for reform in Italy can be characterised as a vernacular movement, which seeks to harness the power of the new printing presses and the reach and appeal of vernacular literature in order to spread its message to the largest possible audience; and more crucially for my purposes, that poetry and
9 Mayer, Reginald Pole, p. 123. On Flaminio, see Carol Maddison, Marcantonio
Flaminio: Poet, Humanist and Reformer (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965); Alessandro Pastore, Marcantonio Flaminio: fortune e sfortune di un chierico nell’Italia del Cinquecento (Milan: Angeli, 1981).
10 Mayer, Reginald Pole, p. 118.
11 On the hypothesis concerning Flaminio’s authorship of the Beneficio, see Fenlon,
Heresy and Obedience in Tridentine Italy, pp. 69–88. See also, on the involvement of Reginald Pole and others in the text’s genesis, Mayer, Reginald Pole, pp. 119–23.
12 Rime di M. Pietro Bembo (Venice: Giovanni Antonio Nicolini da Sabbio, 1530).
On the early publication history of Bembo’s lyric poetry, see Brian Richardson, ‘From
Scribal Publication to Print Publication: Pietro Bembo’s Rime, 1529–1535’, Modern Language Review 95 (2000), 684–95.
13 On Bembo’s links to Pole and his group, see Paolo Simoncelli, ‘Pietro Bembo
e l’evangelismo italiano’, Critica storica 15 (1978), 1–63; also Pertile, ‘Apollonio
Merenda, segretario del Bembo’, pp. 33–5.
14 On this phenomenon in relation to its influence on the literary and ecclesiastical
piety have an intimate relationship in this period. All of which is significant when one considers the role played by the Petrarchan genre in the context of the Reformation in Italy. Petrarchan anthologies and individually authored collections of Rime, much like the books of lettere volgari examined by Anne Schutte in her study, were among the vernacular bestsellers of the new printing industry in sixteenth-century Italy. Small cheap editions of Petrarchan lyrics circulated widely across the peninsula to meet the reading public’s seemingly insatiable appetite for the genre: particularly popular were the anthologies of poems by groups of authors brought together by geographical region or even on occasion by sex.15 The great appeal of the genre during the Renaissance
suggests that we need to re-address the fundamental disregard for the majority of Petrarchists that was displayed by Graf and others in earlier periods and that still lingers today. More specifically for the purposes of the present study, Petrarchism’s great popularity in a printed medium can clearly be seen to contribute to its potential effectiveness as a means of evangelising a message of reformed spirituality to the largest possible audience reading vernacular literature in the period.
It seems pertinent to now turn to a consideration of the formal properties of Petrarchism: which of its particular features can be held to contribute to its suitability as a forum for the transmission of a reformed spirituality? As Roland Greene has pointed out, such formal analysis must precede any attempt to understand the ideological properties of poetry: ‘reading for ideology in lyric without attending to the genre’s elementary modes of expression risks a fundamental incompleteness’.16 Two aspects of sixteenth-century Petrarchism
require specific consideration here: the structure and properties of the individual sonnet, a poetic form that benefits already from a large body of criticism and study; and the properties and qualities of the canzoniere, the unified collection of sonnets into a coherent and, on occasion, authorially controlled whole, equally important as an intrinsic element of the Petrarchan project in this reformed spiritual context.17
15 An example would be the Rime diverse di alcune nobilissime et virtuosissime
donne (Lucca: Vincenzo Busdrago, 1559). More generally on the circulation of books of lyric poems in the period see: Walter Ll. Bullock, ‘Some Notes on the Circulation of
Lyric Poems in Sixteenth-Century Italy’, in Essays and Studies in Honour of Carleton Brown (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), pp. 220–41; Roberto Fedi, La memoria della poesia: canzonieri, lirici e libri di rime nel rinascimento (Rome: Salerno, 1990); Marco Santagata and Amedeo Quondam, eds, Il libro di poesia dal copista al tipografo (Modena: Panini, 1989).
16 Roland Greene, Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western
Lyric Sequence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 6.
17 Brian Richardson has commented on the fact that the ordering of individual
The sonnet has been aptly described as a prescribed form of poetry, that is to say, before the poet ever begins to write, certain properties of his finished product have already been decided, its duration and structure are predetermined.18 But
far from inhibiting the poet, these very limitations appear to act as a positive support, a formula by which he is able to order and express his experience during composition.19 Unable to stray beyond the tight, fourteen-line limits
of the sonnet and bound by its particular exigencies of rhyme and rhythm, the poet suffers the difficulties imposed by the form yet also benefits from its provision of a kind of security, a safe place from which to write. One can see, I believe, how these qualities of the sonnet, its limited space and controlled freedom, offer an ideal starting point from which to commence an exploration of new and challenging ideas.20 In the context of the present study, of course,
such new and challenging ideas would be the specific doctrines of a reformed faith and the ways in which they relate to the individual writer and her own faith. The security and structure provided by the formal containment of the sonnet can fruitfully be compared to the structured nature of courtly society in which Petrarchism first took root in the early modern period. While such a context can be seen to give rise to carefully coded and stylised literary forms, it is also possible to find scope within this arena for a more unexpected mode of creativity. We could in fact argue, in direct opposition to Lauro Martines’s contention that the court acted as an escapist ‘alternate world’, a kind of ‘buffer zone of ideal forms’ protecting the courtier from uncomfortable truths, that the carefully orchestrated and wholly predictable structure of courtly society allowed its members a particular kind of constrained freedom to push beyond boundaries and move towards new realisations and identities.21 The very fact
that the case of Vittoria Colonna herself presents the example of an aristocrat and a woman who, despite the constraints of status and sex, appears able to move into entirely new literary territory in her own Petrarchan endeavours, amply illustrates the surprising freedoms that such a context seems to offer.
The progress that is made towards understanding and illumination within the context of any individual sonnet is necessarily circumscribed by the poem’s
18 For an initial discussion of this poetic ‘prescriptiveness’, see Michael R. G.
Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 1–10.
19 See Alistair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of
Genres and Modes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 31.
20 An early example of the metre’s potential for experimentation would be the
group of ‘comic-realist’ poets of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries,
who turned the sonnet to entirely new ends in both style and themes: see Christopher Kleinhenz, The Early Italian Sonnet: The First Century (1220–1321) (Lecce: Milella, 1986), pp. 159–200.
21 Martines, Power and Imagination, p. 322, p. 323. A parallel could be drawn
with the situation at the court of Frederick II in Sicily in the first half of the thirteenth
century, where the particular courtly environment gave rise to new developments
including the flourishing of the Sicilian School and the establishment of the sonnet as a
tight and unforgiving structure, and thus the poet’s forward motion is gradual and cumulative, relying on the repetitive nature of the greater canzoniere into which each individual sonnet is placed. Roland Greene describes this repetitive quality, one that has frequently been compared to prayer or liturgy, as an aspect of the lyric’s ‘ritual dimension’, its status as script or performance to be vocalised and adopted by the speaker in an act almost of coercion, or submission by the auditor to the poem’s expressive power.22 The involvement
of an audience in the act of repetition performs a unifying function, drawing together a congregation of auditors who are potentially changed by the lyric experience. Once again, the clear possibility presents itself for an exploration of new and challenging spiritual material in such a poetic context.
As well as embodying a natural impulse towards repetition, the Petrarchan canzoniere is by its nature both cyclical and intimate, beginning and ending in the consciousness of the individual poet and a process of examining and lamenting the state of his soul. The exclusively personal focus, the unremitting interiority and univocality of much Petrarchan production, have contributed to its dismissal in the past by the critical establishment as a self-indulgent frivolity, and yet such a reading overlooks or underestimates a very important aspect of this self-reflexive tendency, especially in the context of reform. While it is in any case reductive to claim that the genre does not also fulfil a markedly social and public function that has often been ignored, through epistolary sonnet exchanges between contemporaries for example, even the seemingly personal focus of a sonnet sequence can disguise a more far-reaching project.23 By tying the process of questioning to the particular circumstances
of the individual poet, the path-breaking potential of any new understanding is contained and disguised, and yet, as the comparison to liturgy makes clear, the poetry itself embodies the potential for a collective act of illumination and change. This universalising of personal experience and understanding, which was the governing principle of Petrarch’s own corpus of poems, is of course at the heart of any act of evangelism.
The circularity of the canzoniere, in the context of Petrarch’s own sequence in particular, represents the poet’s frustrations and limitations as he does battle with the overpowering force of love that combats his reason and will, so that as the cycle ends it threatens to begin again, and the poet can only plead with the Virgin Mary to release him from the bonds of love that he cannot undo by himself.24 In the context of a reformed Petrarchism, however, this cyclical
quality in particular takes on new meaning and can be turned to new and wholly positive ends. The entrapment of the poet in the bonds of love becomes
22 Greene, Post-Petrarchism, p. 6.
23 Brian Richardson points out the social function of Petrarchan lyrics evident
in the common practice of scribally publishing single lyric poems rather than unified collections, in ‘From Scribal Publication to Print Publication’, pp. 688–90.
24 See the closing canzone, number 366, ‘Vergine bella, che di sol vestita’, in
a cause of celebration if that love is spiritual rather than earthly, and this is heightened further if one reads the cyclical quality of the sequence in the light of the reformed doctrine of sola fide or justification by faith. According to this doctrine, the individual no longer seeks to control his fate but abandons himself to the action of God’s grace on his soul, so that his acceptance of his powerlessness to instigate change provides testament to the depth of his faith in his status as one of the elect.25 The joyful embracing of a loss of autonomy
that the doctrine of sola fide confers upon the Petrarchan sequence can in fact be linked to the notion of prescribed freedom that is inherent to the sonnet’s structure. The doctrine appears to embody a paradox, as the individual Christian is handed responsibility for developing an active faith through study and contemplation of the word of God, yet at the same time is deprived of the efficacy of good works and instead accepts that his faith has been pre-ordained, his salvation already enacted before his birth. By embracing this paradox in the context of the Petrarchan canzoniere, the poet is offered the freedom to seek for understanding and yet is simultaneously liberated from the responsibility for his actions. Thus while his human limitations might frustrate the poet, they allow him at all times to point beyond his own frailties to the wonder of salvation by faith alone. Where Petrarch’s weakness affords him anguish, the reformed Petrarchist should feel only joy.
A consideration of the reformed doctrine of sola fide as it affects the Petrarchan sequence leads on naturally to the next important subject for consideration, and that is the intimate marriage of Petrarchism with courtly neo-Platonism in the sixteenth century, more specifically neo-Platonism in the Bemban model as expressed in a work such as Gli Asolani (1505), for example, or in Castiglione’s Libro del cortegiano (1528), specifically in the monologue given to the character of Bembo in Book IV.26 There remains
much work to be done on this important topic, but the clear indication is that the expressive qualities of the Ficinian neo-Platonism that developed in the courtly environment in Italy in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries shares numerous characteristics with the manner in which many of the key reformers expressed their spirituality. As neo-Platonism is also a governing principle of Petrarchan production, it could be considered to constitute the ‘missing link’ between Petrarchism and reformed spirituality in this period, accounting for the development of proto-reformist sentiment in this particular genre of literary work.
It is perhaps not surprising, as Roy Battenhouse argued back in 1948, that there is a consonance of language and terminology in the writings of a
25 On the doctrine of justification by faith and its implications for the individual
Christian, see Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, 5 vols (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984), vol. 4, pp. 128–55; Alister E. McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
26 Pietro Bembo, Prose della volgar lingua, Gli Asolani, Rime, ed. by Carlo
reformer such as Calvin and Renaissance neo-Platonists. Calvin, like many of his contemporaries including Luther, was well schooled in the pagan classics, and although he testifies to a conversion to true piety and a rejection of pagan philosophy that is ignorant of the true God, the flavour of his early learning cannot help but colour the manner in which he synthesises and expresses his new faith even as he seeks to move away from such philosophy.27 It is of
course not in question that both Luther and Calvin held themselves apart from Platonic philosophy in their teaching and writing. Indeed those reformers who were open to the employment of such pagan philosophy in expressing their views on salvation and individual illumination all too often found themselves in opposition to orthodoxy on both sides of the Reformation divide, exciting the condemnation of Protestants and Catholics alike.28 My intention is therefore
by no means to deny the distance between Luther and Calvin and Platonism, but to put forward an altogether simpler proposition, that the language and flavour of Platonic philosophy coloured their works by default because it was part of the intellectual air that they were breathing along with everyone else.29
Battenhouse’s reading of Calvin, while it requires cautious treatment, affords some illuminating examples of these cross currents of form and expression. Despite the clear contrast between a neo-Platonic conception of the dignity of man and a Calvinist insistence on his irreversible depravity, there are points at which the two systems speak with similar modulations, for example in relation to a belief in salvation through progress in knowledge (‘knowledge’ as synonymous with ‘faith’), a stress on the role of choice in directing the will towards God, and an over-riding concern with man’s formlessness and his gradual progression towards a restoration of his divine image by slow ascent towards God. The gradual and slow nature of this regeneration is a feature that Calvin stresses in particular, and that can immediately be seen to ally with the quality of the Petrarchan canzoniere already discussed above, that is
27 Roy W. Battenhouse, ‘The Doctrine of Man in Calvin and in Renaissance
Platonism’, Journal of the History of Ideas 9 (1948), 447–71. As testament to his Latin learning, Calvin wrote a commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia in 1532: see Calvin’s Commentary on Seneca’s ‘De Clementia’, ed. and trans. by Ford Lewis Battles and André Malan Hugo (Leiden: Brill, 1969).
28 The fate of Michael Servetus (1511–1553), the Spanish theologian and physician,
is symptomatic: condemned by the Inquisition, he was eventually put to death in Geneva
by the Protestant authorities with Calvin’s approval. See Roland H. Bainton, Hunted Heretic: The Life and Death of Michael Servetus, 1511–1553 (Boston, MA: Beacon
Press, 1953); E. F. Hirsch, ‘Michael Servetus and the Neoplatonic Tradition: God,
Christ and Man’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 42 (1980), 561–75.
29 Meredith Gill has recently argued for the importance of St Augustine as a
conduit for Platonic ideas and language in the Renaissance period: Meredith J. Gill,
Augustine in the Italian Renaissance: Art and Philosophy from Petrarch to Michelangelo
the inch-by-inch progress towards knowledge that each sonnet in a sequence allows.30 Such stress on interiority and individual responsibility for nurturing
an active faith finds clear resonance in the Petrarchan programme.
A more forceful argument for the strange harmony of expressive tools between two such opposing systems can be traced to Naples in the second decade of the sixteenth century, when Vittoria Colonna was passing the first years of her marriage to Francesco Ferrante D’Avalos (1490–1525), Marquis of Pescara, at court on the island of Ischia. As will be demonstrated more fully in Chapter 2, it was during this period that Colonna’s interest in reform thought began to take shape, yet not, as one might expect, through any direct contact with reformers and theologians at this stage, but rather via her links with the various members of the Accademia Pontaniana who frequented the Ischian court, bringing with them a culture of literary endeavour and Christian humanism strongly marked by neo-Platonism. It was via these Augustinian and neo-Platonic routes, through the discussion of literature and more specifically poetry with Neapolitan academicians, that Vittoria Colonna’s thought began to assume its ‘reformed’ flavour, in a fascinating sideways progression that indicates more clearly than anything else the manner in which reformed spirituality and neo-Platonic literary expression could feed one into the other and cross-fertilise. Colonna’s experience in Naples clearly demonstrates the inadequacy of contemporary attempts to categorise and demarcate patterns of dissemination of early Reformation thought in Italy: in practice, words and ideas flowed continually between groups who, in this period, were only hazily aware of the need for careful self-definitions and demarcations.
Of course, it goes without saying that individuals like Colonna who over time came definitively to adopt neo-Platonic language as an effective means of expressing a reformed spirituality were misunderstanding or muddying the theology of the northern reformers. Such muddying was perhaps not surprising, in a climate in which theological certainties evaded even those highest placed in the church hierarchies.31 On a literary level, given that Platonic philosophy
itself had been bastardised and adapted to suit the requirements of particular literary genres and social groupings, theological clarity becomes even more of a remote possibility. What is clear in Colonna’s case at least is that neo-Platonic modes of thought, in the particular manner in which they found literary expression in this period, could be well suited to the needs of a writer who
30 See Battenhouse, ‘The Doctrine of Man’, pp. 457–8. The slow progress in
knowledge is also a feature of Cassinese Benedictine spirituality: see Barry Collett,
Italian Benedictine Scholars and the Reformation: The Congregation of Santa Giustina of Padua (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).
31 The uncertainty about the status of sola fide in Italy before the first convocation
of the Council of Trent is a clear illustration of the extent of this doctrinal ‘zona d’ombra’
in the early years of the sixteenth century. The phrase belongs to Concetta Ranieri, applied to doctrinal uncertainty in the thought of Vittoria Colonna: Concetta Ranieri,
sought to express her understanding of the new faith, and furthermore, that the Petrarchan genre, built around an aspiration towards neo-Platonic ascent and illumination, would occupy a primary position in this endeavour.32
One final aspect of Petrarchan production must be brought briefly into play in this consideration of the particular qualities of Renaissance Petrarchism that offer themselves to a reformed spiritual programme, and that is the practice of literary imitatio, underpinning any Petrarchan endeavour but so little understood by subsequent critics of the genre.33 It was of course Bembo who
won the day in the sixteenth century in advocating a rigidly Ciceronian model of imitatio, despite the criticism of worthy opponents such as Castiglione.34 In
adopting this approach, in which a ‘divine’ precedent is chosen as the model for all subsequent literary production because it is unsurpassable in its beauty and integrity, Bembo is in line with Petrarch himself, who draws not only on classical texts but also on the practice of imitatio Christi so successfully disseminated by the Franciscans.35 Caroline Walker Bynum has discussed the
importance in twelfth-century religious practice of imitatio in the formation of a group identity, as a means of shaping both the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ man, and the manner in which this concern for groups and models of behaviour co-existed harmoniously, perhaps more during the twelfth century than in any other historical period, with a growing awareness of selfhood and individuality.36
It is possible to turn Bynum’s analysis to the service of literary imitatio in a useful way. In the literary arena, as in the religious, the act of conforming to a carefully selected model confers moral and ethical integrity upon the text, signals its inclusion within the group or canon, yet simultaneously allows space for and indeed encourages the development of the individual voice. If we take into account the important presence of an ethical and religious dimension to the practice of imitating literary models that is conferred by imitatio Christi, then the genre of Petrarchism, so wholly faithful to the model of ‘perfect and divine’ vernacular poetic production, is afforded a gravitas that has completely eluded many modern readers. It is notable that the quality of gravitas was one
32 Significantly, Petrarch himself was read as a proto-Protestant in sixteenth-century
commentaries by Fausto da Longiano, Antonio Brucioli and Ludovico Castelvetro: see William J. Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 67–81.
33 See the useful synthesis of previous criticism, including some striking
misunderstandings of the practice of imitatio, in Hempfer, ‘Per una definizione del
Petrarchismo’, pp. 23–52.
34 Castiglione’s humorous mocking of Bembo’s position is given in Il libro del
cortegiano, Book I, xxvi, in which a fawning courtier imitates King Ferdinand II of
Naples’ facial tic without realising that it was caused by illness.
35 See Dina de Rentiis, ‘Sul ruolo di Petrarca nella storia dell’imitatio auctorum’,
in Blanc, ed., Dynamique d’une expansion culturelle, pp. 63–74.
36 Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?’,
in Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, CA:
that Bembo sought in particular in the Petrarchism of his contemporaries as the key to the best and most beautiful lyrics, and found in abundance in the work of Vittoria Colonna.37
By tying the production of Petrarchan lyric poetry to the development of reformed currents of thought in Italy in the early decades of the sixteenth-century, as the preceding analysis has started to do, one can also begin to argue more forcefully that the Petrarchism of the Italian Renaissance was not, as has been claimed in the past, a pointless and facile exercise in repetition and mimicry, but rather a medium that was perfectly in tune with the wider social and religious currents of the age and well adapted to capture and reflect them back to a vernacular reading public. With a subtle force born of the slow accumulation of ideas, ennobled by the gravitas conferred by literary and religious models, harnessing the persuasive intimacy and liberating confinement of the sonnet structure, in the hands of its cleverest and most spirited practitioners Petrarchism is far from Graf’s chronic sickness of Italian literature. Rather it is transformed into a gift to the reformers, capable of carrying an important spiritual message beyond the limits of the Italian ‘Reformation’ into the wider realm of literary endeavour.
Summary of the Argument
It is the purpose of the following chapters to explore the manner in which Colonna’s poetry drew on the ideas set out above concerning the potential for Petrarchism to embody a reformed religious programme, and to endeavour to assess how far she was successful in creating a spiritually engaged poetry that conveyed a message to a wide audience. In the interests of careful contextualisation with a view to correcting the errors of the past, Chapter 1 reconstructs aspects of Colonna’s biography alongside the history of print production of her works in the sixteenth century, in order to illuminate the development and dissemination of a public image that protected the poet from malign attention and allowed her literary career to flourish. It is this image, so artfully constructed by the poet in collusion with her editors during her lifetime, that has proved so enduring and has in some ways impeded a clearer reassessment of the content and value of the poetry itself.
Chapter 2 examines Colonna’s exposure to the Italian reform movement and its ideas, beginning with the years of her early married life in Naples and progressing to her involvement with the spirituali in the early 1540s. This discussion seeks in particular to underline the organic and essentially undogmatic nature of the poet’s exposure to ideas about religion that would come to characterise her literary production. In addition, Chapter 2 undertakes a detailed reading of some of the reformed vernacular texts in circulation
37 On Bembo’s judgement of Colonna’s verses as suitably ‘grave’, see Carlo
during Colonna’s lifetime to which she would have had direct access, in order to highlight the particularly lyric qualities of the evangelical language used in such texts and its relation to vernacular poetry writing. Conclusions are drawn about the nature of exchanges between members of groups of reformers, as well as concerning the status of poetry as an integral component of the process of communal religious exploration.
Chapters 3 and 4 examine Colonna’s private gift manuscripts of sonnets, prepared with the author’s collusion and presented to Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) in Rome and Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549) in France, the only known examples of her voluntary dissemination of unpublished work.38 The gifting of these manuscripts to carefully selected individuals
highlights the status of gift-giving as a reformed practice among evangelicals in the period. In addition, the particular content and organisation of each of these (very different) manuscript gifts sheds light on the shared concerns and ideas governing such important friendships. Finally, the existence of these two manuscripts indicates Colonna’s active involvement in the exchange of ideas about religion and reform, in a poetic vein, within a community of like-minded men and women.
In Chapter 5 I turn to an examination of Colonna’s prose writings, works that can be considered to have developed out of her close involvement with the spirituali. The Pianto sopra la passione di Christo, a meditation on Mary’s role in the Passion drama, looks back towards earlier models of devotional writing whilst exploring Mary’s status and importance from a new and unexpected perspective. The writer’s interest in the Virgin appears to be an attempt to develop Mary’s status as a role model for female spiritual life, not according to the medieval model of a divine mediatrix far from mankind’s experience, but on a new human level that asserts her position as the primary example of the way to Christ through faith. Colonna’s interest in the figure of Mary no doubt arose from her very particular position as a high-profile woman writer and public figure, and in addition as the only woman that is known to have been present at the meetings of the spirituali in Viterbo. Further prose works,
38 A third manuscript was in fact sent to Francesco della Torre in 1541, when
he was acting as secretary to Giovanni Matteo Giberti, Bishop of Verona and a close correspondent of Colonna’s. Della Torre’s manuscript is thought to be MS II.IX.30 in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence. The sending of this third manuscript, however, appears to have been agreed under different conditions from those relating to the manuscripts prepared for Michelangelo and Marguerite de Navarre, primarily because della Torre
only asked to borrow a manuscript (one that was clearly already in existence), and promised to return it once he had finished copying out the sonnets. See Alan Bullock, ‘A
Hitherto Unexplored Manuscript of 100 Poems by Vittoria Colonna in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence’, Italian Studies 21 (1966), 42–56; Colonna, Rime, ed.
by Bullock, pp. 325–7. Carlo Dionisotti disagrees with Bullock’s identification of the
della Torre manuscript, believing that he would have been sent a collection of recently composed spiritual verse, rather than the sonnets dedicated to d’Avalos (the majority already published numerous times by the 1540s) contained in the manuscript examined
including three letters to her cousin published in a sixteenth-century edition, confirm and further develop this significant Marian emphasis.
Chapter 6 considers the important question of Colonna’s other readers, those who did not frequent the close circle of like-minded aristocrats who met in Naples, Rome and Viterbo to exchange ideas about reform. Through a reading of a highly significant commentary on Colonna’s sonnets, published twice in the sixteenth century, I obtain access to the insights of one particularly informed evangelical reader of the texts, and ask important questions about the impact of his commentary on the wider reception of Colonna’s verses in print. In addition, the reissuing of the commentary in the 1550s points towards conclusions about the durability of the phenomenon of evangelism in Italy that helps to correct earlier more limited periodisations.
The Making of a Renaissance
Publishing Phenomenon
Introduction
The temptation to assimilate the persona and the literary production of any writer of Petrarchan lyrics is often great, the material offering itself with ease to a reading that allies the personal experiences of the individual writer with the particular torments, or indeed joys, that he expresses through the lyric. Petrarch himself, of course, contributed much to this implicit, and explicit, sense of autobiography through his clever deployment of dates and events that organised his poetic canzoniere into an apparently coherent and progressive unit carrying him forward through the years, a temporal progression that worked against the thematically cyclical nature of the poems themselves, establishing a fruitful lyric tension. In the case of the woman writer of Petrarchan lyrics, the urge to read biographically seems to be stronger still. One imagines, in fact, that the women who first chose Petrarchism as their means of access to the cultural arena did so knowingly, well aware of the genre’s propensity to be allied with the life. Through the wholly decorous and delicate deployment of the properties and themes offered by the genre, the woman writer might be able to present herself as an acceptable and unimpeachable addition to the literary world, in other words, could deploy the self-fashioning elements of the poetic text to the ends of depicting herself as precisely the model virtuosa that the public sought. To imagine that this process was not in many ways one of careful manipulation and artfulness, however, would be naïve.1
The convergence of life and art in the lyric genre becomes particularly problematic when one turns to the sixteenth-century reception of Petrarch and Petrarchism, a period in which the desire to read Petrarch himself in a biographical vein became so dominant that scholars expended great amounts of energy in arguing over the ‘facts’ relating to the poet’s love affair with ‘Madonna Laura’, herself indubitably a ‘real’ person whose place and date of birth and rank, as well as her literary accomplishments, were all to be firmly established, despite the seemingly complete lack of concrete evidence.2
1 A fascinating example of the tendency to read Colonna’s poetic canzoniere as
a record of her life is an early monograph that analyses her Petrarchan production in a psychoanalytical vein, in order to diagnose the poet’s various neurotic illnesses: see Francesco Galdi, Vittoria Colonna dal lato della neuro-psicopatologia (Portici: Spedalieri, 1898).
2 For a discussion of this tendency, see Virginia Cox, ‘Sixteenth-Century Women
Petrarchists and the Legacy of Laura’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies
According to this biographical mode of reading, the imitators of Petrarch themselves were required by the genre to enact, as far as possible, the love story that their verses recounted. That such passions were necessarily denied or unrequited was no doubt helpful in this regard, as the male poet was free to choose any worthy lady (one with the necessary public reputation for beauty and honour) to whom he might direct his poetic yearnings. And even if the muse was married to another man this did not generally prove problematic, as the entirely sublimated longing expressed in the lyric was equally flattering to the lady and her real-life consort.3 In the case of women Petrarchists
negotiating such autobiographical terrain, the longed-for lover is necessarily a husband, one who is absent or deceased, and thus, unusually, the poetry is based on a relationship that has been reciprocated at some time in the past, injecting perhaps a greater degree of pragmatism into the lyric yearnings.4 It
is tempting to wonder if the great popularity of printed Petrarchan collections and anthologies among the sixteenth-century reading public was to some extent related to the vicarious thrill of gaining insights into the supposedly ‘real’ amorous troubles of the rich and famous.
In the interests of unpicking the deeply knotted strands of ‘life’ and ‘art’ that have co-existed for so many centuries in Vittoria Colonna’s case, it seems important initially to trace the salient facts of the poet’s biography, in order subsequently to highlight those areas of her experience that contributed to her own ability to ‘market’ herself (or be marketed by her editors) through her poetry in such a highly successful manner. In arguing that we must seek to move away from the biographism of sixteenth-century readings, that life and art cannot be interrelated in an automatic and thoughtless way, I am forced to confront the obvious fact that Colonna’s life did, quite conveniently and no doubt necessarily, afford her the opportunities for literary self-fashioning that were to prove so enduring and important. If her husband had not been famed for his courage and bravery in battle, allowing her to set him up as the paragon of virtue and heroism to which she was inevitably drawn… If he had not left home for long periods so that she was given the opportunity to miss him and long for his return… If he had not expired early and tragically leaving his wife with the banner of widowhood (as well as wealth and independence) on which to pin her poetic colours… It is not necessary, or fruitful, to attempt to explain away these consonances as matters of little importance: they are, of
3 A clear example of such practice is the poetry addressed to Vittoria Colonna by
Girolamo Britonio, a younger nobleman who fought together with her husband in a number of battles: his collection was published as Gelosia del sole (Naples: [no pub.],
1519). The poet continually stresses his lady’s fidelity to her husband, and thus flatters
D’Avalos by default, perhaps in the hope of advancement or favours.
4 The two female Petrarchists who enjoyed the greatest degree of fame in the first
half of the sixteenth-century, Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara (1485–1550), were both widowed, thus provided by circumstance with the necessary context of loss and longing that the genre demanded. Far more problematic were those poets, such as
Gaspara Stampa (1523–1554), who located their lyric outside the necessary confines of
