A Companion to Vittoria Colonna

Abigail Brundin is a Reader in Early Modern Literature and Culture in the Department of Italian at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of St Catharine’s College. She has published on women writers in the first age of print, on literature and religious reform, including censorship and the first Indexes of Prohibited Books, and on poetry in and around convents. Her books include Vittoria Colonna, Sonnets for Michelangelo (Chicago: 2005) and Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation (Aldershot: 2008). Tatiana Crivelli is Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Zurich, where from 2004 to 2014 she also directed the Centre for Renaissance Studies. She has published books on Giacomo Leopardi and on the novel in 18th-century Italy, but among her research interests women’s writing has a particular relevance. Her most recent books are La donzelletta che nulla temea. Percorsi alternativi nella letteratura italiana tra Sette e Ottocento (Rome: 2014) and Pellegra Bongiovanni, Risposte a nome di Madonna Laura alle Rime di Messer Francesco Petrarca in vita della medesima (Rome-Padua: 2014). Maria Serena Sapegno teaches medieval Italian Literature (Boccaccio and Petrarca), renaissance culture (political thought, historiography, utopian treatises, women poets), and 19th-century literature at “La Sapienza” University of Rome, where she also teaches Women’s and Gender Studies. Her most recent publications are Il senso e le forme. Storia e Antologia della letteratura Italiana (Florence: 2011) and L’Italia dei poeti (Rome: 2013).

Notes on Editors and Contributors
List of Figures
Timeline: Vittoria Colonna in Context
Note on the Text
Bibliographical Abbreviations

Part I: Vittoria Colonna: Life and Letters
Introduction
Abigail Brundin, Tatiana Crivelli, and Maria Serena Sapegno
Chapter 1: Vittoria Colonna’s Epistolary Works
Adriana Chemello

Part II: The Poetry
Chapter 2: Vittoria Colonna in Manuscript
Abigail Brundin
Chapter 3: The Print Tradition of Vittoria Colonna’s Rime
Tatiana Crivelli
Chapter 4: The Rime: A Textual Conundrum?
Maria Serena Sapegno
Chapter 5: Vittoria Colonna and Language
Helena Sanson

Part III: Vittoria Colonna and the Arts
Chapter 6: Vittoria Colonna: The Pictorial Evidence
Gaudenz Freuler
Chapter 7: Colonna and Michelangelo: Drawings and Paintings
Maria Forcellino
Chapter 8: Musical Settings of the Rime
Anne Piéjus

Part IV: Vittoria Colonna and Religion
Chapter 9: Prudential Friendship and Religious Reform: Vittoria Colonna and Gasparo Contarini
Stephen Bowd
Chapter 10: Vittoria Colonna and Bernardino Ochino
Emidio Campi
Chapter 11: Religious Prose Writings
Eleonora Carinci

Part V: Vittoria Colonna as Literary Model and Authority Figure
Chapter 12: The Lyric Voices of Vittoria Colonna and the Women of the Giolito Anthologies, 1545–1559
Diana Robin
Chapter 13: The Exemplary Vittoria Colonna
Virginia Cox

Bibliography
Index