Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-10-31T23:20:44.744Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

13 - Colonna and Petrarch in the Rime of Lucia Colao

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2021

Get access

Summary

Abstract

The lyric production of the Friulian writer Lucia Colao (b. 1578), which survives in two manuscripts, represents a rare female contribution to the tradition of religious rewritings of Petrarch, which began in the 1530s with Girolamo Malipiero's Petrarca spirituale. Colao recasts in a spiritual form 121 Petrarchan lyrics, all from the first part of the RVF. This chapter analyzes the complexities of the relationship between hypotext and hypertext in Colao's reworkings, and the dialectic between conservation, substitution and resemantization of the lexis and content of the originals. It also considers how Colao's texts construct a feminine subject within lyric discourse, in a manner that reflects the lessons of Vittoria Colonna's earlier creative appropriation of Petrarch in her spiritual lyrics.

Keywords: literary adaptations and appropriations, religious poetry, devotional literature, lyric poetry books, manuscript and printing

A little-known episode in the history of the sixteenth-century reception of the Italian classics concerns their religious ‘conversion’, a curious case of productive reception (to use the terminology of Klaus W. Hempfer), which involves works both by authors canonized within the critical debate of the period (Petrarch, Boccaccio, Tasso), and by authors legitimized through their immense publishing success (Ariosto). This process of spiritual rewriting can be as minimal as repurposed citation, or it can extend as far as a complete transfer of structure, concepts and forms from one cultural code to another. The reception of Petrarch's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta offers a precocious and highly articulated example of this phenomenon, spanning both the ideologically inflected theorizing and formal codification we see in Girolamo Malipiero's Petrarcha spirituale (1536), and the militant rewriting of Giovan Giacomo Salvatorino's Thesoro di sacra scrittura sopra le rime di Petrarcha (1539), as well as the ventriloquized, female-voiced fragmenta we find in the Risposte di m[adonna] Laura a m[esser] Francesco Petrarcha, attributed to Stefano Colonna (1552).

Within this general context, I intend to concentrate my attention on the lyric production of the Friulian writer Lucia Colao, who, in my view, gives interesting evidence of the persistence of Vittoria Colonna's fortunes within the post-Tridentine period, as well as attesting to the role that Colonna's religious lyrics had assumed as a legitimizing stylistic and thematic model for female poets. We have very few biographical details for Colao.

Type
Chapter
Information
Vittoria Colonna
Poetry, Religion, Art, Impact
, pp. 309 - 330
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×