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

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ignorance reigned among the wider population about what was or wasn‟t banned. The convents that willingly compiled the inventories and submitted them to the authorities seem to have made no attempt to disguise the presence of banned books within their walls, including in many cases vernacular Bibles. 63 It was almost as if the Indexes had had little impact within the convent walls. What might be the reasons for this seeming freedom experienced by women writers and women readers, including nuns, precisely during a period traditionally viewed as one of clamp-down and paranoia? How might we account for it given the church‟s seeming concern with policing the minds and book collections of women in particular? Virginia Cox has categorised the period 1580-1620 as one of „affirmation‟ for women writers, who were established as a considerable presence on the literary scene precisely during the first years of the Counter Reformation, building on the success of earlier writers such as Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara. 64 During the last decades of the sixteenth century, what is more, women wrote in a far wider range of genres than had ever been seen previously, including straying into determinedly masculine genres such as tragedy and epic. Cox convincingly argues that precisely the new moralising impetus of the age allowed for the more comprehensive integration of women within Italian literary culture: „the reborn literature of the post-Tridentine period [...] was far more easily morally consonant with a female authorial persona.‟ 65 This seeming paradox, the increasing participation of women in literary culture in a period of increasing control and paranoia, acts as a vital corrective to a tendency to view the machinations of censorship as universally successful and debilitating. ‘Reformed’ poetry in the late cinquecento 63 Evidence for possession of vernacular Bibles is provided in the two articles by Carmela Compare cited in notes 60 and 61, above. 64 Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, pp.131-65. 65 Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, p.136. 20
The example of Gabriel Fiamma, cited earlier for his appearance on the Parma Index, is a useful one to bring into a final section devoted to the longevity of reformed currents of poetic practice into the late century. Fiamma was a noted preacher, who became Bishop of Chioggia in 1584, after the appearance of his Rime spirituali on the Parma Index. 66 Notably his work appeared on no subsequent Index, suggesting that the particular concern with Petrarchism in Parma was not shared more widely. Equally his other published texts (sermons and a substantial work of lives of the saints) never came in for censure. Fiamma‟s collection of spiritualised Petrarchism is consciously modelled on the earlier example of Vittoria Colonna, whom he cites as the first and best to have turned the lyric muse to matters of the soul: Certainly everyone knows that the most illustrious Lady Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa of Pescara, was the first who began to write with dignity in lyric verse of spiritual matters, paving the way and opening the path for me to follow and reach wherever it pleased God to lead me. 67 Fiamma shares with Colonna a belief in the evangelical power of poetry, as a tool to reach and bring to God as many souls as possible. He also derives from Colonna‟s model an essential Christocentric optimism founded in the wonder of salvation. 68 A fundamental aspect of the poetic task that Fiamma sets himself is to refine the most polished poetic style, one that fully matches the beauty of Petrarch‟s fourteenth-century model, but supersedes it in the embracing of newly spiritual subject matter. Only a truly 66 On Fiamma see DBI, 47 (1997), pp.330-1. An earlier accusation of heresy was levelled at him in Naples in 1562, but the charges were later dropped. On his preaching, see Emily Michelson, ‘Preaching Scripture under Pressure in Tridentine Italy: a Case Study of Gabriele Fiamma’, Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis, 85 (2005), 257-68. 67 ‘Et certamente che, essendo noto a ciascuno che l’Illust*rissima+ Signora Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa di Pescara, è stata la prima, che ha cominciato a scrivere con dignità in Rime le cose spirituali, e m’ha fatta la strada, e aperto il camino di penetrare, e giungere ove è piacuto a Dio di condurmi’: Fiamma, Rime spirituali, dedicatory letter (unpaginated). 68 On these aspects see Ossola, ‘Il “queto travaglio” di Gabriele Fiamma’, pp.258-9. 21
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Re-Writing Trent, or What Happened to Italian Literature in the Wake ...

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