Vittoria Colonna

This edited collection presents fresh and original work on Vittoria Colonna, perhaps the outstanding female figure of the Italian Renaissance, a leading Petrarchist poet, and an important figure in the Italian Reform movement. Until recently best known for her close spiritual friendship with Michelangelo, she is increasingly recognized as a powerful and distinctive poetic voice, a cultural and religious icon, and an important literary model for both men and women. This volume comprises compelling new research by established and emerging scholars in the fields of literature, book history, religious history, and art history, including several studies of Colonna’s influence during the Counter-Reformation, a period long neglected by Italian cultural historiography. The Colonna who emerges from this new reading is one who challenges traditional constructions of women’s place in Italian literature: no mere imitator or follower, but an innovator and founder of schools in her own right.

Cox Virginia :

Virginia Cox is Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. Her books include Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650 (2008), The Prodigious Muse: Women’s Writing in Counter-Reformation Italy (2011), Lyric Poetry by Women of the Italian Renaissance (2013) and A Short History of the Italian Renaissance (2015).McHugh Shannon :

Shannon McHugh is Associate Professor of Italian and French at University of Massachusetts Boston. She is co-translator of Writings on the Sisters of San Luca and Their Miraculous Madonna (Iter Press, 2015) and co-editor of Innovation in the Italian Counter-Reformation (University of Delaware Press, 2020) and Vittoria Colonna: Poetry, Religion, Art, Impact (Amsterdam University Press, 2021).

“It is thrilling to see the diverseness of Colonna’s oeuvre highlighted in the growing field of research that this volume embodies... Meticulous archival work supports the close readings of the literary texts and allows the volume’s contributors to present exciting perspectives on Colonna and her 254 book reviews circles that have not previously been discussed.”
-Johanna Vernqvist, Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, 45.4, Fall 2022