Re-Writing Trent, or What Happened to Italian Literature in the Wake ...

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century, indeed were fundamental to its development and vitality. Scribal dissemination was also a means by which fellow poets could debate the contours of their craft, including, in a post-Tridentine context, the onus to produce a poetry that was sufficiently „pure‟, both in terms of content and style, to meet the demands of the Tridentine age. And poetry also had a particularly vital role to play in relation to the oral transmission of texts, both through recitation in public places and private houses, and also through sung performance. 48 We might note, by way of a compelling example, that the spiritual Petrarchism of both Vittoria Colonna and Gabriel Fiamma were very popular choices for musical settings in the late sixteenth century. Thus while the problem of the Indexes cannot be ignored, there are ways in which literary culture continued to flourish at one remove from censorship throughout the later sixteenth century and beyond. Side-stepping the censors: the gender question The relation of the issue of gender to the presence of Italian literature on the Indexes is a fascinating one, that has recently been opened up in some useful ways by Virginia Cox‟s monumental study of women writers in the period. 49 Cox‟s study allows us to chart the rapid increase in the number of published women in Italy in the second half of the sixteenth century. Yet intriguingly, there are almost no women writers on the sixteenth-century Indexes. Of the three Italian women writers I located in De Bujanda‟s thesaurus of sixteenth- century Indexes, one (Veronica Franco, 1546-91) was a courtesan, one (Olympia Morata, 1526-55) a Protestant and exile, and finally the „activist‟ nun Paola Antonia Negri (1508-55) was closely associated with certain high profile reformers, including Bernardino Ochino. 50 48 See the relevant chapter, ‘Orality, manuscript and the circulation of verse’, in Richardson, Manuscript Culture, pp.226-58. 49 Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, cit. 50 On Franco see Margaret F. Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan. Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); on Morata see Olimpia Morata, The Complete Writings of an Italian Heretic, ed. and trans. Holt N. Parker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 16
Thus all three are condemned for reasons not specifically related to their literary production. Only two of the three Italians mentioned might be deemed to write „professionally‟, one in the vernacular (Franco) and one in Latin (Morata). 51 The third, Negri, was condemned for her published letters, written during the course of her life to a wide variety of recipients. 52 Compare this to the total number of published works by women writers in Italy in the sixteenth century (approximately 216 editions, compared to Italy‟s nearest rival France, with 30 editions 53 ), and one gets a sense of how completely the censors were missing the boat in controlling the many new and potentially troubling avenues of literary production by women. Nor should we assume that female authored texts escaped censorship because they remained essentially conservative and unproblematically orthodox over the course of the late century. The obvious case in point here is Vittoria Colonna, of course, whose poetry clearly strayed into doctrinal positions that, after Trent, were wholly untenable, yet continued to be published into the 1580s. 54 Colonna may have been protected from censorship by her aristocratic pedigree and reputation for impeccable piety, or perhaps simply because works by women circulated below the censors‟ radar. Readers were more astute, as the impounding of her works mentioned above makes clear. Other female writers similarly continued to operate with great freedom in surprising ways right into the late century. Eleonora Carinci 2003); on Negri see Rita Bacchiddu, ‘«Hanno per capo et maestra una monaca giovane»: l'ascesa e il declino di Paola Antonia Negri’, in Religioni e Società, 51 (2005), 58-77, and M. Firpo, ‘Paola Antonia Negri da “divina madre Maestra” a “Spirito Diabolico”’, in Barnabiti Studi, 7 (1990), 7-66. 51 Franco’s poetry was first published as Terze rime di Veronica Franca al serenissimo signor Duca di Mantova et di Monferrato (n.p.: n.pub., *1575+). Morata’s Latin works were first published posthumously as Olympiae Fulviae Moratae mulieris omnium eruditissimae Latina et Graeca, quae haberi potuerunt, monumenta, ed. Caius Secundus Curio (Basel: Petrum Pernam, 1558). 52 Negri’s letters were published as Paola Antonia Negri, Lettere Spirituali della devota religiosa Angelica Paola Antonia de Negri milanese (Rome: in aedibus Populi Romani, 1576). 53 The most up-to-date list for Italy is in Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, pp.236-41. See also (for a less comprehensive list), Axel Erdmann, My Gracious Silence: Women in the Mirror of Sixteenth-Century Printing in Western Europe (Lucerne: Gilhofer and Rauschberg, 1999), pp.206-23 (the list for France is on pp.201-04). The figure cited above includes works of uncertain authorship, anthologies with multiple female authors (counted only once), and works published posthumously. 54 The two late editions are: Quattordeci sonetti spirituali della illustrissima et eccellentissima divina Vittoria Colonna D’Avalos de Aquino Marchesa di Pescara (Venice: Scotto, 1580) (a musical setting for five voices); and Rime spirituali della S. Vittoria Colonna, Marchesana Illustrissima di Pescara (Verona: Discepoli, 1586). 17
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Re-Writing Trent, or What Happened to Italian Literature in the Wake ...

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