Description
Book SynopsisThis edited collection presents fresh and original work on Vittoria Colonna, perhaps the outstanding female figure of the Italian Renaissance, a leading Petrarchist poet, and an important figure in the Italian Reform movement. Until recently best known for her close spiritual friendship with Michelangelo, she is increasingly recognized as a powerful and distinctive poetic voice, a cultural and religious icon, and an important literary model for both men and women. This volume comprises compelling new research by established and emerging scholars in the fields of literature, book history, religious history, and art history, including several studies of Colonna’s influence during the Counter-Reformation, a period long neglected by Italian cultural historiography. The Colonna who emerges from this new reading is one who challenges traditional constructions of women’s place in Italian literature: no mere imitator or follower, but an innovator and founder of schools in her own right.
Trade Review“It is thrilling to see the diverseness of Colonna’s oeuvre highlighted in the growing field of research that this volume embodies... Meticulous archival work supports the close readings of the literary texts and allows the volume’s contributors to present exciting perspectives on Colonna and her 254 book reviews circles that have not previously been discussed.”
-Johanna Vernqvist,
Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, 45.4, Fall 2022
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Twenty-First Century Vittoria Colonna - Virginia Cox
Part 1 Literary and Spiritual Sociability
1. The D’Avalos-Colonna Literary Circle: A ‘Renewed Parnassus’ - Shulamit Furstenberg-Levi
2. Late Love: Vittoria Colonna and Reginald Pole - Ramie Targoff
Part 2 Widowhood
3.
Magistra apostolorum: The Virgin Mary in Birgitta of Sweden and Vittoria Colonna - Unn Falkeid
4. Outdoing Colonna: Widowhood Poetry in the Late Cinquecento - Anna Wainwright
Part 3 Poetry
5. The Epistolary Vittoria - Maria Serena Sapegno
6. ‘Ex illo mea, mi Daniel, Victoria pendet’ : A Forgotten Spiritual Epigram by Vittoria Colonna - Veronica Copello
7. Religious Desire in the Poetry of Vittoria Colonna : Insights into Early Modern Piety and Poetics - Sarah Rolfe Prodan
Part 4 Art
8. ‘Inscribed Upon Their Hearts’: Copying and the Dissemination of Devotion - Jessica Maratsos
9. Titian, Colonna, and the Gender of Pictorial Devotion - Christopher J. Nygren
10. ‘A More Loving and Constant Heart’ : Vittoria Colonna, Alfonso d’Avalos, Michelangelo and the Complicated History of Pontormo’s
Noli me tangere - Dennis Geronimus
Part 5 Readership
11. ‘Leading Others on the Road to Salvation’ : Vittoria Colonna and Her Readers - Abigail Brundin
12. ‘In Competition with and Perhaps More Felicitously Than Petrarch’ : The Canonization of Vittoria Colonna in Rinaldo Corso’s
Tutte le rime (1558) - Humberto Gonzalez Chavez
Part 6 Impact
13. Colonna and Petrarch in the
Rime of Lucia Colao - Andrea Torre
14. ‘I Take Thee’: Vittoria Colonna, Conjugal Verse and Male
poeti colonnesi - Shannon McHugh
15. ‘She Showed the World a Beacon of Female Worth’ : Vittoria Colonna in Arcadia - Tatiana Crivelli
Volume Bibliography
Index of Citations of Colonna’s Letters and Verse
Thematic Index
