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.

Virginia Cox is Professor of Italian Studies at New York University. 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).

Shannon McHugh is Assistant Professor of Italian and French at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is coeditor of Innovation in the Italian Counter-Reformation (2020) and cotranslator of Diodata Malvasia, Writings on the Sisters of San Luca and Their Miraculous Madonna (2015). Her book project is titled Petrarch’s Metamorphosis.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Twenty-First Century Vittoria Colonna (Virginia Cox)
PART 1: LITERARY AND SPIRITUAL SOCIABILITY 1. The D’Avalos—Colonna Literary Circle: A ‘Renewed Parnassus’ (Shulamit Furstenberg-Levi)
2. Late Love: Vittoria Colonna and Reginald Pole (Ramie Targoff)
PART 2: WIDOWHOOD
3. Magistra Apostolorum: The Virgin Mary in Birgitta of Sweden and Vittoria Colonna (Unn Falkeid)
4. Outdoing Colonna: Widowhood Poetry in the Late Cinquecento (Anna Wainwright)
PART 3: POETRY
5. The Epistolary Vittoria (Maria Serena Sapegno)
6. ‘Ex illo mea, mi Daniel, Victoria pendet’: A Forgotten Spiritual Epigram by Vittoria Colonna (Veronica Copello)
7. Religious Desire in the Poetry of Vittoria Colonna: Insights into Early Modern Piety and Poetics (Sarah Rolfe Prodan)
PART 4: ART 8. ‘Inscribed Upon Their Hearts’: Copying and the Dissemination of Devotion (Jessica Maratsos)
9. Titian, Colonna, and the Gender of Pictorial Devotion (Christopher Nygren)
10. ‘A More Loving and Constant Heart’: Vittoria Colonna, Alfonso d’Avalos, Michelangelo, and the Complicated History of Pontormo’s Noli me tangere (Dennis Geronimus)
PART 5: READERSHIP
11. ‘Leading Others on the Road to Salvation’: Vittoria Colonna and Her Readers (Abigail Brundin)
12. ‘In Competition with and Perhaps More Felicitously Than Petrarch’: The Canonization of Vittoria Colonna in Rinaldo Corso’s Tutte le rime (1558) (Humberto González Chávez)
PART 6: IMPACT
13. Colonna and Petrarch in the Rime of Lucia Colao (Andrea Torre)
14. ‘I Take Thee’: Vittoria Colonna, Conjugal Verse, and Male Poeti Colonnesi (Shannon McHugh)
15. ‘She Showed the World a Beacon of Female Worth’: Vittoria Colonna in Arcadia (Tatiana Crivelli)
Volume Bibliography
Index