Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation

Vittoria Colonna was one of the best known and most highly celebrated female poets of the Italian Renaissance. She was best known for her skill in constructing tightly controlled and beautifully modulated Petrarchan sonnets. Colonna was also deeply involved with groups of reformers in Italy before the Council of Trent, an involvement which had a profound effect on her literary production. This book will be essential reading for scholars interested in issues of gender, literature, religious reform or the dynamics of cultural transmission in sixteenth-century Italy. It also provides an excellent background and contextualisation of Colonna's writings and her role as a mediator between the worlds of courtly Petrachism and religious reform.