The Sword and the Pen: Women, Politics, and Poetry in Sixteenth-Century Siena

Introduction

Introduction Il ne sera jamais, dames siennoises, que je n’immortalize vostre nom tant que le livre de Monluc vivra; car, à la verité, vous estes dignes d’immortelles loüanges, si jamais femmes le furent. —Blaise de Monluc, Commentaires In the mid–sixteenth century, as the ancient republic of Siena was coming to an end, torn apart by insoluble internal divisions and by overwhelming external forces, a group of women suddenly appeared on the city’s cultural landscape and began to compose poetry that attracted the attention not only of the local literati but also of prominent writers elsewhere in Italy. While today the names of these women sound completely unfamiliar to most scholars of Italian literature, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they rang out loudly to the honor not only of the women who bore them but of their families, their city, and their sex. The poems they composed—sonnets, madrigals, and canzoni— appeared in many of the collections of poetry published in those centuries . They also formed an integral part of the three major collections of women’s poetry assembled over the course of three different centu ries by Ludovico Domenichi (1559), Antonio Bulifon (1695), and Luisa Bergalli (1726), thus attesting to their enduring popularity. What is fascinating about these Sienese women poets is not so much that they composed poetry in the Petrarchan style that was current at 1 the time but that some of them engaged with Petrarch’s poetic legacy in ways that were significantly different from those of more traditional and better-known Italian women poets of the time, writers such as Veronica Gambara (1486–1550), Vittoria Colonna (1490–1547), Tullia d’Aragona (ca. 1510–56), Gaspara Stampa (1523–54), and Veronica Franco (1546–91), to mention just a few. This volume will thus look at these Sienese women poets as persons who, though part of and fully engaged with a much larger literary, intellectual, social, and political dynamic, were nonetheless individuals in their own right, contributing in an original manner to the world around them. Firmly grounded in the realities of their time, these Sienese women used the Petrarchan idiom to correspond , to plead, to congratulate, and to lament. In so doing, they called upon a network of contacts, both private and public, both literary and political, both lay and religious, that extended well beyond the medieval walls of Siena to reach across the Italian peninsula and as far as the royal house of France and the Imperial family of Spain. And, in one case at least, they crossed the boundaries of normative sexuality to express a profound same-sex affection between two women that was seen as “lesbian ” (to use a modern word) even by their own contemporaries. While it might be tempting to align the current study with Carlo Dionisotti’s periodization of women’s writing in Italy, this should not be done. In his highly influential “La letteratura italiana nell’età del Concilio di Trento,” the Italian scholar acknowledged the presence of women writers throughout medieval and Renaissance Italy but also claimed that such a presence had been limited to a few exceptional individuals. He then suggested that, as a group, women did not appear on the Italian literary stage until the mid–sixteenth century and then only for a very brief time, that is, from about 1538 to 1560.1 Although Dionisotti’s periodization fits very closely with the flowering of women poets in Siena discussed in this volume, I would like to distance my study from it on the grounds that the Sienese case should not be seen as representative of all of Italy. A much more accurate picture of women’s writing in Renaissance Italy is presented, instead, by Virginia Cox when she points out that women’s presence in Italian letters was “much more durable” than Dionisotti suggested. As Cox convincingly points out, “By at least the last decade of the fifteenth century, women had attained a fairly high2 T H E S W O R D A N D T H E P E N profile place within Italian literature, a place they held, with fluctuations, for over a century, until the early decades of the seventeenth.”2 My study is thus better seen as yet another tessera in the greater mosaic that is women’s participation in Italian letters. As a tessera, it is small but not insignificant, for it bears some similarities with but also some marked differences...