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

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has identified highly unorthodox interpretations of scripture and apocrypha in Marian works by Maddalena Campiglia (1553-95), Chiara Matraini (1515-1604) and Lucrezia Marinella (1571-1653), including overt borrowings from and citations of Pietro Aretino, who had long been on the Index. 55 Her findings suggest that, precisely in the period of the early Indexes, women writers could with impunity write experimentally, including on devotional topics. It also raises the interesting issue of the potential for the most seemingly „orthodox‟ devotional genres (in this case lives of the Virgin Mary) to express unexpected views and even highly creative interpretations of scripture. These were of course the genres that were most insistently aimed at women readers, considered to be suitable reading matter for weaker minds that needed protecting from potential heterodoxy. 56 Not only as writers, but also as readers, the official picture of female literary activity in the late century, as one confined to carefully orthodox devotional texts, fails to match recent discoveries about actual lived experience. The case of convent reading matter is particularly interesting, and relatively easy to track thanks to late-century inventories of convent books. Even as the Vatican sought to render convents increasingly impregnable in the post-Tridentine period, exchanges with the outside world continued. Convents were important political and economic institutions in local communities, maintaining ties to wealthy local families, and goods and services, including books, necessarily trafficked in and out in a number of ways. 57 Alongside the small number of books that girls from good families might be permitted to bring with them from the paternal home, books were purchased by nuns from local book-sellers with the funds provided by their families and held in the safe 55 Eleonora Carinci, ‘Lives of the Virgin Mary’ by Women Writers in post-Tridentine Italy. University of Cambridge, November 2009 (unpublished doctoral thesis). 56 Fragnito, Proibito capire, pp.9-10. 57 On the political centrality of convents in the period, see Jutta Gisela Sperling, Convents and the Body Politic in late Renaissance Venice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 18
keeping of the abbess. 58 The precious records of such purchases demonstrate that nuns were reading more widely than might be expected from the official pronouncements on their activities, including in the field of vernacular poetry. Inventories of convent books also illustrate that, while convent libraries might contain only the narrow range of officially condoned texts that nuns were permitted, individual nuns continued to keep their own collections of books, which were often not officially sanctioned. 59 The existence of copies of Petrarch‟s Rime sparse (as well as Girolamo Malipiero‟s „spiritualised‟ rewriting of Petrarch 60 ), of works by Vittoria Colonna, Francesca Turina Bufalini, Benedetto Varchi, Gabriel Fiamma, and Luigi Tansillo, among others, points to a widespread appreciation of Petrarchan culture within Italian convents both before and after the Council of Trent. 61 What is more, the presence of both Gabriel Fiamma and Luigi Tansillo on various of the post- Tridentine Indexes of Prohibited Books increases the sense of a considerable gap between „official‟ and actual reading matter for nuns, as for female readers more generally, in the Tridentine period. 62 It also reinforces my suspicion, expressed earlier, that confusion or 58 Evidence for nuns’ book-buying habits is provided in Paul F. Gehl, ‘Libri per donne. Le monache clienti del libraio fiorentino Piero Morosi (1588-1607)’, in Gabriella Zarri, ed., Donna, disciplina e creanza cristiana dal XV al XVII secolo: studi e testi a stampa (Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1996), pp.67-80; and Danilo Zardin, ‘Mercato librario e letture devote nella svolta del Cinquecento tridentino. Note in margine ad un inventario Milanese di libri di monache’, in Stampa, libri e letture a Milano nell’età di Carlo Borromeo, eds. Nicola Raponi and Angelo Turchini (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1992), pp.135-246. See also, on the cultural achievements of an autodidact nun, Prospera Corona Bascapè, and the consumption of books in the early modern convent, Danilo Zardin, Donna e religiosa di rara eccellenza: Prospera Corona Bascapè, i libri e la cultura nei monasteri milanesi del Cinque e Seicento (Florence: Olschki, 1992), especially pp.201-48. Zardin notes in particular the practice of loaning books within the convent. 59 See Carmela Compare, ‘Inventari di biblioteche monastiche femminili alla fine del XVI secolo’, Genesis: Rivista della Società Italiana delle Storiche, II/2 (2003), 220-32. 60 On the presence of Malipiero in a convent inventory, see Carmela Compare, ‘I libri delle clarisse osservanti nella Provincia seraphica S. Francisci di fine ’500’, Franciscana, IV (2002), 169-372 (p.337). The work (reprinted seven times before 1600) is Girolamo Malipiero, Il Petrarca Spirituale (Venice: Marcolini, 1536). See also Amedeo Quondam, ‘Riscrittura – Citazione – Parodia del codice: Il Petrarca spirituale di Girolamo Malipiero’, Studi e problemi di critica testuale, 17 (1978), 77-128. 61 Gehl mentions a copy of ‘Petrarca’ purchased for a Florentine nun (‘Libri per donne’, p.74); Zardin notes that Gabriel Fiamma’s Rime spirituali and Vittoria Colonna’s Pianto sopra la passione di Cristo were owned by nuns in Milan (‘Mercato librario’, p.57, p.203); Compare cites Benedetto Varchi’s Sonetti spirituali (‘Inventari di biblioteche’, p.228); the same author notes ownership by Franciscan nuns of poetry by Tansillo, Fiamma and Francesca Turina Bufalini (‘I libri delle clarisse osservanti’, p.224, pp.232-3, p.293, p.300, p.311, p.340, p.344, p.350). 62 See Thesaurus de la littérature interdite, p.183, p.381. 19
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