Table Of ContentVittoria 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
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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
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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
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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.
