Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation For Dan Woodford Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation ABIGAIL BRUNDIN University of Cambridge, UK © Abigail Brundin 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Abigail Brundin has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Gower House Suite 420 Croft Road 101 Cherry Street Aldershot Burlington, VT 05401-4405 Hampshire GU11 3HR USA England 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 Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall. 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 Index 215 This page intentionally left blank 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. Thomas F. Mayer, Augustana College This page intentionally left blank 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 lustre conferred by her famous friend.