Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation Catholic Christendom, 1300 1700

  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 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

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

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  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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  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 ₁ and literary acclaim. 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 ₂ that are not considered serious or lasting. 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 ₃ lives of the powerful men she knew. 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

VITTORIA COLONNA

  x 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 ₄ contemporaries, that her work is, as a result, dry and unappealing.

  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,

  

Colonna is nevertheless a good Petrarchan emulator, given the limitations of the code,

and an astounding female voice in a male-oriented canon.’ See Italian Women Writers:

A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, ed. by Rinaldina Russell (Westport, CT: Greenwood

  

PREFACE

  xi 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

₅

convien ch’a morte il gran nome si toglia.

  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

and epistolary, more or less following the categorisation imposed on the poems by

VITTORIA COLONNA

  xii 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 ₆ of the phenomenon of Italian reform and its precise character. 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 ₇ distinction between them. 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 Italy beyond Viterbo and the ₈ close group of individuals who met there to other groups, cities and locations. 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 ₉ choice of terms. 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 9} Mayer, Reginald Pole, chapter 3, esp. pp. 103–4.

  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

Italian Evangelism: Scholarship, 1953–1978’, Sixteenth Century Journal 9 (1978), 3–26

  

PREFACE

  xiii 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.

  Abigail Brundin

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  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. A final vote of thanks, for support of the most fundamental kind, must go to my lovely family for their interest and encouragement. Thanks to all the

  Brundins, who are never backward in offering their various forms of expertise, especially to my mother for her genuine interest. Thanks to Jane and David Woodford for those numerous early morning trips down the A14 to provide

VITTORIA COLONNA

  xvi emergency childcare. Special thanks to Dan Woodford. He has been, as he always is, immensely patient and understanding, feeding me late at night, parenting my children in my frequent absences, a debt too great to describe. Finally to Liddy and Saul, who make it all worthwhile, and are also the reason why it all took so long…

  

  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 ₁ wide reach and appeal of reformed spirituality. 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 ₂ before it found itself on Della Casa’s 1549 Index. 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 ₃ subjects by prominent Italian reformers. 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

₄ to arms was quickly recognised.

  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

the full text of Ambrogio Catharino’s response, the Compendio d’errori et inganni

VITTORIA COLONNA

  2 ₅ it. 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 ₆ of the period? 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 ₇ insufficiently explored to date. 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 ₈ spiritual programme of such men. 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

_{e e e}

expansion culturelle. Pétrarque en Europe XIV –XX siècle. Actes du XXVI 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

PETRARCHISM, NEO-PLATONISM AND REFORM

  3 which included poets such as Vittoria Colonna and Marcantonio Flaminio ₉

  (1498–1550) among its number. 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 ₁₀ easy and beautiful style which he had of writing Latin and the vernacular’. 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 ₁₁ widely held to have been at least partially responsible for its authorship.

  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 ₁₂ printed collection for the first time in 1530. 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 ₁₃ when he was made a cardinal, closely tied to the authorities in Rome. 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 ₁₄ the very heart of the religious establishment. 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 11} Mayer, Reginald Pole, p. 118.

  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

ambitions of the poet Giovanni Della Casa, see Giovanni Della Casa, Le Rime, ed. by

VITTORIA COLONNA

  4 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 ₁₅ on occasion by sex. 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 ₁₆ fundamental incompleteness’. 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 ₁₇ reformed spiritual context. 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

sonnets into a unified canzoniere was not universally understood or appreciated as a

vital facet of Petrarchan production in the sixteenth century, a misunderstanding that

led to some editors of Petrarch failing to respect the poet’s original, careful ordering of

PETRARCHISM, NEO-PLATONISM AND REFORM

  5 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 ₁₈ have already been decided, its duration and structure are predetermined. 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 ₁₉ during composition. 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 ₂₀ of new and challenging ideas. 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 ₂₁ boundaries and move towards new realisations and identities. 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

VITTORIA COLONNA

  6 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 ₂₂ submission by the auditor to the poem’s expressive power. 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 ₂₃ project. 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 ₂₄ by himself. 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 23} Greene, Post-Petrarchism, p. 6.

  Brian Richardson points out the social function of Petrarchan lyrics evident

in the common practice of scribally publishing single lyric poems rather than unified