CAPÍTULO II: LA RACIONALIDAD POLÍTICA COMO RACIONALIDAD PRÁCTICA
3. EL AGENTE: SUJETO DEL CONOCIMIENTO PRÁCTICO
The prevalent participation of female poets in the Petrarchan tradition distinguishes lyric poetry as a fundamental genre of women’s literary and cultural production in Renaissance Italy. Women’s vernacular poetry began receiving critical attention in Italy around the 1530s and 1540s when the work of Veronica Gambara, a wealthy noblewoman from Brescia, and Vittoria Colonna, the marchesa of Pescara from an aristocratic and politically important Roman family, reached a wider audience.21 Both women made their first print appearance in the second edition of Bembo’s Rime (1535), which featured sonnet exchanges between the Venetian writer and each woman
respectively.22 With their exceptional poetic ability on display in Bembo’s Rime, the two women were
well on their way to canonization. Three years later, Colonna’s own Rime was published in a pirated edition in 1538, which subsequently underwent thirteen editions until her death in 1547. Though the first edition of Gambara’s collected poetry did not arrive in print until 1759, her lyric nonetheless featured prominently in anthologies from 1545 and onward.
Colonna and Gambara became the models for later women Petrarchists to emulate for they “had successfully combined the pursuit of literary excellence with a flawless moral character, thus establishing the respectability of literature as an appropriate activity for women.”23 The second
generation of women Petrarchists no longer had to rely on male-authored lyric as their authoritative models; they instead could draw on Colonna’s and Gambara’s verse. Their poetry achieved this
21 Earlier precedents for women’s vernacular poetry dates to the 1470s as woman like Lucrezia Tornabuoni (1427–1482), Antonia Pulci (1433–1508), and Ginevra de’ Benci (1457–ca.1520) composed such lyric. However, a discussion of these authors as antecedents to Petrarchism has received little attention. See Cox,
Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650, 45–53.
22 Prior to this publication however, Colonna and Gambara were already well known and well connected to elite literary circles where they circulated manuscript copies of their lyrics. Diana Robin, “The Breasts of Vittoria Colonna,” California Italian Studies 3, no. 1 (2012): 2. Ariosto had also already praised their poetic production in cantos 37 and 46 in third edition of his Orlando furioso published in 1532.
highly imitative status because of their recasting of Petrarchan themes in devout, chaste, and faithful ways. Not only did they flip the gender paradigm of Petrarch’s verse with the poetic subject now depicted as female, and the love object, instead, as male but they also contributed greatly to spiritual Petrarchan lyric, especially Colonna. In accommodating the female voice and experience in their lyric, they were careful to represent amorous sentiments in a way that also complied with
contemporary female decorum.24 For instance, instead of portraying the pain and suffering
characteristic of unrequited and adulterous love as Petrarch does with Laura, Colonna and Gambara detail married love, particularly their separation from their husbands while at war or once widowed.25
In writing from the position of wife and widow, Colonna and Gambara present female desire as chaste. For instance, after the death of her husband, Ferrante d’Avalos (1490–1525), Colonna asserts her devotion to him remains strong and she will never take another lover again: “Di così nobil fiamma Amor mi cinse / ch’essendo morta in me vive l’ardore; / né temo novo caldo, ché ‘l vigore / del primo foco mio tutt’altri estinse.”26 As Janet Smarr summarizes with respect to Colonna’s verse,
the love she describes is rational, not sensual, often featuring nonplatonic undercurrents.27 For
Gambara, too, her characterization of love is pure; hers is a conjugal, consummated love.
24 Ann Rosalind Jones, “Female Petrarchists,” in The Cambridge Companion to Petrarch, ed. Albert Russell Ascoli and Unn Falkeid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 225. For a compelling reading of the erotic undercurrents present in Colonna’s Rime amorose see Shannon McHugh, “Rethinking Vittoria Colonna: Gender and Desire in the Rime amorose,” The Italianist 33, no. 3 (2013): 345–60. For a biography on Colonna see Ramie Targoff, Renaissance Woman: The Life of Vittoria Colonna (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018).
25 Both women’s husbands died in battle. Gambara was widowed in 1519, never remarried, and remained the regent countess of Correggio. Meanwhile, Colonna was left a widow in 1525, and she, too, did not remarry. While Gambara wrote poems about her husband in vita, Colonna, with one exception, composed poems about him after his death. Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650, 70.
26 Vittoria Colonna, Rime, ed. Alan Bullock (Rome-Bari: Gius. Latereza & Figli, 1982), 6.
27 Janet Levarie Smarr, “Substituting for Laura: Objects of Desire for Renaissance Women Poets,” Comparative
In addition to amorous lyric, the two women also wrote spiritual and political poetry, demonstrating the adaptability and variation of female-authored verse within the Petrarchan tradition. In her Rime spirituali, the title given to the fifth edition of Colonna’s poems published in 1539, she turns to God, a similar transformation that occurs at the end of Petrarch’s Canzoniere.28
Colonna’s spiritual verse reflects her deep religious conversion; her husband no longer features as the primary inspiration for her verse. Rather, the focus of her lyric morphs into discussions on deep Christian and spiritual concerns.29 Gambara, too, wrote spiritual verse, but on a much smaller scale.
Rejecting love as a subject matter in her mature poetry and influenced by her role as dowager
Countess of Correggio, she instead chose to focus her later poetry on public themes such as praising Charles V’s imperialism or celebrating her homelands of Brescia and Correggio.30 In one sonnet,
Gambara pays respect to Pope Paul III, lauding his third encounter with Charles V in 1534. She ends the poem with the words, “Italia mia,” echoing the opening lines of RVF 128, one of
28 Jones, “Female Petrarchists,” 202. After the death of her husband, Colonna’s intellectual network included important churchman like Gasparo Contarini (1483–1542), Reginald Pole (1500–1558), Capuchin Bernardino Ochino (1487–1564), and perhaps Juan de Valdés (1509–1541), a reformist scholar who fled the Spanish Inquisition for Naples in 1530. For a discussion of Colonna’s “spiritual Petrarchism” and its influence on the Italian Reformation see Fiora A. Bassanese, “Vittoria Colonna’s Man/God,” Annali d’Italianistica 25 (2007): 263–74; Abigail Brundin, “Vittoria Colonna and the Poetry of Reform,” Italian Studies 57 (2002): 61–74; Brundin, Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation; Rinaldina Russell, “The Mind’s Pursuit of the Divine. A Survey of Secular and Religious Themes in Vittoria Colonna’s Sonnets,” Forum Italicum 26, no. 1 (1992): 14–27; Targoff, Renaissance Woman: The Life of Vittoria Colonna, 227–74.
29 The change in subject matter from amorous to religious verse makes it possible, as Joseph Gibaldi notes, to view Colonna’s oeuvre as “embodying the Neoplatonic ladder of love.” Moreover, he argues that her verse progresses “as the poems do from the early declarations of passionate earthly love […] through the
Petrarchan delineation of idealized human love in her middle years to the final religious poems that culminate, poetically if perhaps not chronologically in her Triumph of Christ’s Cross.” Joseph Gibaldi, “Vittoria Colonna: Child, Woman, and Poet,” in Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Katharina M. Wilson (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1987), 31.
30 Gambara had personal ties to Charles V as her elder son, Ippolito, served in his imperial army. She had also met with the Holy Roman Emperor on numerous occasions, even inviting him to stay at her Correggio court in 1530, and she fully supported his military campaign in Italy. Molly M. Martin, “Introduction,” in Veronica
Gambara: Complete Poems, by Veronica Gambara, ed. Molly M. Martin and Paola Ugolini (Toronto: Iter
Petrarch’s most political poems.31 As their verse reveals, Colonna’s and Gambara’s poetry, like verse
of Petrarch, was not only limited to the topic of love. By expanding their lyric to cover diverse topics and themes, they participated in the cultural discourses of their time, paving the way for later women poets to insert their voices in similar public arenas.
The legacy of Colonna’s and Gambara’s poetry held strong as a new generation of women Petrarchists emerged during the second half of the sixteenth century.32 Such women included Tullia
d’Aragona (ca.1510–1556), Chiara Matraini (1515–1604), Laura Terracina (1519–ca.1577), Gaspara Stampa (1523–1554), Laura Battiferra (1523–1589), and Veronica Franco (1546–1591), to name a few. This second wave of female Petrarchists, in similar manner to that of their predecessors, reinvented Petrarchan lyric to suit their own voices. They differed from their foremothers in that most of them were not born into important, noble families (with the exception of Terracina). For example, Matraini was born to a middleclass family of weavers in Lucca, Battiferra was the
illegitimate child of a nobleman and a prostitute, and d’Aragona’s Roman noble family lineage is still disputed.33 The majority of these women were neither associated with the court nor with socially
acceptable roles such as that of wife and widow; Stampa was a celebrated virtuosa, praised for having one of the most beautiful voices in Venice while d’Aragona and Franco were cortigiane oneste, who
31 Richard Poss, “Veronica Gambara: Renaissance Gentildonna,” in Women Writers of the Renaissance and
Reformation, ed. Katharina M. Wilson (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1987), 52.
32 By 1560, Colonna’s Rime had undergone fifteen editions (one in 1538, four in 1539, two in 1540, two in 1544, and one each in 1546, 1548, 1552, 1559, and 1560). As mentioned earlier, a collection of Gambara’s work in print was only made available by 1759. Prior to that publication, her verse was included regularly in lyric anthologies. For a list of women’s published writings in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries see Cox,
Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650, 235.
33 A recently found Sienese notary document shows that Tullia’s mother, Giulia, was the daughter of the Orsino Pendaglia, presumably a member (either natural or legitimate) of the noble family of Ferrara. The document also names Giulia as the wife of Africano Orlandini, a member of the Sienese nobility. Julia L. Hairston, “Introduction,” in The Poems and Letters of Tullia d’Aragona and Others, by Tullia d’Aragona, ed. and trans. Julia L. Hairston (Toronto: Iter Academic Press, 2014), 11.
weaved successfully in an out of elite literary circles even though they received hostile criticism from detractors on the promiscuous nature of their occupation.
The verse of these later female Petrarchists was also modified. While they still implemented the gender paradigm initiated by Colonna and Gambara—situating the poetic “I” as female and the beloved as male—the love they depicted was not always chaste. Scholars often point to Stampa’s poetry as most evident of this transformation, for she chooses as her love object, Count Collaltino di Collalto (1523–1568), a nobleman from the Treviso area with whom she had an affair. In her
Rime, published posthumously in 1554 by her sister Cassandra, over two hundred of the poems are
about Collaltino, but she also describes the beginnings of a relationship she had with another man named Bartolomeo Zen. For a woman to write about the tribulations of the heart with different men was considered indecorous. The important distinction here though, is that not only does she situate Collaltino and Zen as her beloveds, but she also depicts her desire for them as physical, passionate, and intense.34 In one sonnet for example, Stampa parallels the experience of being caught at sea to
the growing intensity of her love:
A mezzo il mare, ch’io varcai tre anni fra dubbi venti, ed era quasi in porto, m’ha ricondotta Amor, che a sì gran torto è ne’ travagli miei pronto e ne’ danni; e per doppiare a’ miei disiri i vanni un sì chiaro oriente agli occhi ha pòrto, che, rimirando lui, prendo conforto, e par che manco il travagliar m’affanni. Un foco eguale al primo foco io sento, e, se in sì poco spazio questo è tale, che de l’altro non sia maggior, pavento. Ma che poss’io, se m’è l’arder fatale,
34 Stampa never married. As Jane Tylus explains, her inferior social status in comparison to Collaltino’s “would have prevented the count from ever taking their relationship seriously.” “Introduction,” in Gaspara
Stampa: The Complete Poems, by Gaspara Stampa, ed. Jane Tylus and Troy Tower (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2010), 3. The count’s inaccessibility to Stampa and the pain it causes her are well described in her Rime. For more on how Stampa uses Petrarchan conventions to depict the count’s emotional and social unavailability see Smarr, “Substituting for Laura: Objects of Desire for Renaissance Women Poets,” 15–20.
se volontariamente andar consento d’un foco in altro, e d’un in altro male?35
As Fiora Bassanese has argued with respect to this poem, Stampa subverts, in erotic terms, Petrarch’s boat metaphor from RVF 132—which he implements to denote his emotional distress over Laura—to express her glee in returning to the choppy waves of love.36 Her representation of
strong affection stands in stark contrast to “the ideals of the courtly love tradition, as well as most poetry of the period influenced by Platonic ideas and Petrarchan conventions,” signifying a break with such models.37
Another example that shows how later women poets built on the verse of their
predecessors can be found in Matraini’s Rime et prose, first published in 1555.38 Her canzoniere amoroso
treats the tragic love affair she had with a married man, Bartolomeo Graziani, that came to an end when he was murdered by his wife’s brother. Like Stampa, she portrays love outside the confines of marriage. Matraini follows Petrarch’s model in outlining her love story from its beginning (falling in love and praising the beloved) to its end (the death of the beloved which results in a religious conclusion). She also explicitly evokes Petrarch’s and Colonna’s verse when she equates Graziani to the sun, a recurrent descriptor Petrarch uses to describe Laura and one that Colonna attributes to
35 Gaspara Stampa, Gaspara Stampa: Selected Poems, ed. and trans. Laura Anne Stortoni and Mary Prentice Lillie (New York: Italica Press, 1994), 174.
36 Fiora A. Bassanese, “Gaspara Stampa’s Petrarchan Commemorations: Validating a Female Lyric Discourse,” Annali d’Italianistica 22 (2004): 166.
37 Unn Falkeid and Aileen Feng, “Introduction,” in Rethinking Gaspara Stampa in the Canon of Renaissance Poetry, ed. Unn Falkeid and Aileen Feng (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 4.
38 In addition to a canzionere amoroso, the Rime et prose also includes two prose sections including a letter addressed to an unidentified man defending love as a subject matter and the Orazione dell’arte della guerra. Additionally, Matraini was mentored by Lodovico Domenichi who included her poetry in his 1556 anthology,
Delle rime di diversi eccellentissimi autori. Giovanna Rabitti, “Introduction,” in Chiara Matraini: Selected Poetry and Prose, by Chiara Matraini, ed. Elaine Maclachlan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 2, 10.
her late husband.39 However, her lyric differs in that it is explicitly autobiographical; for instance, she
describes in detail the brutal assassination of her lover in addition to the anger she felt in learning that his murderer went unpunished: “Or dell’ardente suo furore il nostro / nemico traditor trionfa e gode / qual fea Neron ne l’alta arsion di Roma. / Ma se di così ardente e crudel Mostro/ la giust’ ira di Dio l’ardir non doma, / che direm noi? Ch’ei pur lo vede et ode.”40 The sprinkling of these
autobiographical elements within the confines of Petrarchan lyric displays Matraini’s experimentation with form.41
Stampa and Matraini are just two examples of women poets who followed in the footsteps of their female predecessors, but still continued the revision and personalization of Petrarchan themes. Unlike Colonna and Gambara who adapted their lyric so that it fit with the expectations of their gender, these later poets challenged male-authored conventions of Petrarchism.42 Many of
these women played with Petrarchan form in their amorous verse, but as we saw earlier with Colonna and Gambara, they also composed lyric on other topics. Domenichi’s anthology includes lyric from both the earlier and later women Petrarchists, providing an array of women who
subverted Petrarchan and courtly love themes. Charting the development of women’s engagement with Petrarchan lyric and the way they adapted Petrarchan verse to their liking provides a foundation
39 As Rinaldina Russell explains, Matraini was heavily influenced by Colonna’s lyric. “Chiara Matraini nella tradizione lirica femminile,” Forum Italicum 34, no. 2 (Fall 2000): 415.
40 Chiara Matraini, Selected Poetry and Prose: A Bilingual Edition, ed. and trans. Elaine Maclachlan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 96.
41 Rabitti, “Introduction,” 14.
42 This is the key idea that frames Ann Rosalind Jones’ groundbreaking study, Currency of Eros: Women’s Love
Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). Jones uses the Gramscian idea of negotiation made popular by cultural studies specialists to understand how Renaissance women poets in
England, France, and Italy used love lyric to challenge gender ideologies and male-dominated literary traditions.
for interpreting their treatments of other themes, like that of friendship. But, where does friendship as a theme fit into the genre of lyric poetry?