front cover of In Defense of Women
In Defense of Women
A Bilingual Edition
Pompeo Colonna
Iter Press, 2024
An important contribution to early public debates on the nature of women written by a cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church.

Pompeo Colonna’s In Defense of Women (1530), presented in this volume in Latin and English translation, is one of several important defenses of women composed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by male advocates of women’s moral and intellectual worth. Known as a cardinal and a warrior, but also as an active participant in sixteenth-century Italian literary circles, Colonna addresses the work to his cousin Vittoria Colonna, the most renowned Italian woman poet of the era, who, he writes, had urged him to undertake it. His Defense not only refutes arguments of women’s inferiority and incapacity but, remarkably, asserts their ability to hold political office and govern. It contains original Latin text and a critical introduction by Franco Minonzio. It also features a foreword by Margaret L. King, as well as a postscript by King, tracing the separate male-authored and female-authored Renaissance defenses of women.
 
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front cover of Poems of Widowhood
Poems of Widowhood
A Bilingual Edition of the 1538 "Rime"
Vittoria Colonna
Iter Press, 2021
Vittoria Colonna’s 1538 Rime, originally issued without her permission by a small Parma press, was the first of many editions of her poetry published during her lifetime. Born into one of the most powerful families in Rome and connected to many of the great political, religious, and artistic figures of the period, Colonna was uniquely positioned to transform the landscape of women’s writing. The first woman to see her own poems appear in print in a single-author volume, she led the way for hundreds of other women of her time to publish their own works. Comprising more than one hundred and forty sonnets and two canzoni, the Rime expresses Colonna’s anguish over the loss of her husband and her struggle both to preserve his memory and secure her own future.

This volume presents the first complete English translation of the 1538 Rime and restores the original Italian texts from the blemished Parma printing and later composite editions, a boon to readers of both languages.
 
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front cover of Selected Letters, 1523-1546
Selected Letters, 1523-1546
A Bilingual Edition
Vittoria Colonna
Iter Press, 2022
Forty revealing personal letters written by a key figure from the Italian Renaissance.

The most celebrated woman writer of the Italian Renaissance, Vittoria Colonna was known for her elegant poetry and use of the sonnet form to explore pressing religious questions. The selection of Colonna’s letters presented here for the first time in a collected edition was written to and from writers, artists, popes, cardinals, employees, and family members. Together they place Colonna at the center of intersecting epistolary networks as a political actor, theological thinker, literary practitioner, and caring friend. Revealing a historical woman speaking and acting with force in the world, these letters constitute a vital tool for anyone seeking to understand Colonna’s literary works. Newly translated, this work reveals new aspects and faces of the most celebrated woman writer of the Italian Renaissance.


 
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front cover of Who Is Mary?
Who Is Mary?
Three Early Modern Women on the Idea of the Virgin Mary
Vittoria Colonna, Chiara Matraini, and Lucrezia Marinella
University of Chicago Press, 2009
For women of the Italian Renaissance, the Virgin Mary was one of the most important role models. Who Is Mary? presents devotional works written by three women better known for their secular writings: Vittoria Colonna, famed for her Petrarchan lyric verse; Chiara Matraini, one of the most original poets of her generation; and the wide-ranging, intellectually ambitious polemicist Lucrezia Marinella. At a time when the cult of the Virgin was undergoing a substantial process of redefinition, these texts cast fascinating light on the beliefs  of Catholic women in the Renaissance, and also, in the cases of Matraini and Marinella, on contemporaneous women’s social behavior, prescribed for them by male writers in books on female decorum.  
            Who Is Mary? testifies to the emotional and spiritual relationships that women had with the figure of Mary, whom they were required to emulate as the epitome of femininity. Now available for the first time in English-language translation, these writings suggest new possibilities for women in both religious and civil culture and provide a window to women’s spirituality, concerning the most important icon set before them, as wives, mothers, and Christians.
 
 
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