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
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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
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction

Petrarchism, Neo-Platonism and Reform

vii
ix
xv
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
Index

193
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 nonconfessional. 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.


x

VITTORIA COLONNA

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 underappreciated 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,

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
Press, 1994), p. 87.


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
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
and epistolary, more or less following the categorisation imposed on the poems by
sixteenth-century editors.


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
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 Italy beyond 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
Italian Evangelism: Scholarship, 1953–1978’, Sixteenth Century Journal 9 (1978), 3–26
(pp. 22–4).


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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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.
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

xvi

VITTORIA COLONNA

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…


INTRODUCTION

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
the full text of Ambrogio Catharino’s response, the Compendio d’errori et inganni
Luterani… (pp. 345–422).


VITTORIA COLONNA

2

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
di filologia italiana 57 (1999), 277–93.


PETRARCHISM, NEO-PLATONISM AND REFORM

3

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
ambitions of the poet Giovanni Della Casa, see Giovanni Della Casa, Le Rime, ed. by
Roberto Fedi, 2 vols (Rome: Salerno, 1978), vol. 1, pp. xvi–xviii.


4

VITTORIA COLONNA

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
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
his oeuvre: see ‘From Scribal Publication to Print Publication’, pp. 687–8.


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
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
poetic form: see Kleinhenz, The Early Italian Sonnet, pp. 10–16.


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
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.
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
Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, ed. by Marco Santagata (Milan: Mondadori, 1996),
pp. 1397–1416.
23


PETRARCHISM, NEO-PLATONISM AND REFORM

7

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 preordained, 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

Dionisotti (Milan: Tascabili Editori Associati, 1997); Baldassare Castiglione, Il libro
del cortegiano, ed. by Ettore Bonora (Milan: Mursia, 1972).


8

VITTORIA COLONNA

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
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). See also, for an illuminating discussion
of the complex relationship between language and theology in the early sixteenth
century, Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and
Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).