A decade ago, in an essay on Italian literature and gender, Rebecca West reflected on the immortality imbued by ‘becoming an adjective’. She pointed out that the Italian tradition is thick with authorial modifiers: dantesco; petrarchesco. Yet for women writers, rising to the critical status of adjective is all but unheard of.

What follows here is an essay about Vittoria Colonna, authority and male poeti colonnesi. Colonna's impact on sixteenth-century Italian women writers, especially of love lyric, has been well recognised. Similarly widely accepted is her importance for spiritual Petrarchists of both genders. Much rarer, however, is acknowledgement of her influence on love poetry authored by male writers. I aim to show how ‘conjugal verse’—love poetry about marital love, rather than unrequited passion—flourished in Italy as an alternative but persistent vein of love lyric after Colonna's model. This subgenre functions differently from traditional amorous verse in important, inherently philogynous ways, by praising historically specific women rather than abstracted and idealised love objects. The fact that this subcategory of Petrarchism had at its head a woman writer only increases its feminist bona fides.

Through the conjugal verse tradition, I argue, it is possible to trace a line of descent from Colonna, on to Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), onward to a group of versifying widowers in her Neapolitan cultural sphere, and down through a series of husband-poets stretching into the early seventeenth century. Acknowledgement of this genealogy grants us fuller appreciation of Colonna's role in the Italian canon.