Reviewed by:
  • Laura Battiferra and Her Literary Circle: An Anthology
Laura Battiferra degli Ammannati . Laura Battiferra and Her Literary Circle: An Anthology. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Ed. and trans. Victoria Kirkham. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006. xiv + 494 pp. index. append. illus. bibl. $64 (cl), $25 (pbk). ISBN: 0-226-03922-6 (cl), 0-226-03923-4 (pbk).

Laura Battiferra (1523–89) has had a good millennium so far. Practically out of print since 1694, in recent years her editorial fortunes have changed sharply, with new Italian editions of both her main works — Il primo libro delle opere toscane (1560) and Sette salmi penitenziali (1564), edited by Enrico Maria Guidi in 2000 and 2005, respectively — and now this ambitious and generously-annotated bilingual edition of selections of her complete writings by Victoria Kirkham, already the author of a series of groundbreaking studies on Battiferra, appearing since the mid-1990s. This reemergence is well-timed. During Petrarchism's long period in the wilderness, critical attention tended to be confined to poets capable of sustaining the label of "transgressive" (Gaspara Stampa, Michelangelo), or those with a narratable life (or death) capable of reflecting biographical drama onto the verse (Isabella da Morra). A poet as imitatively correct and biographically un-newsworthy as Battiferra had few hopes of engaging sustained interest — at most, she might aspire to some slim notice as the wife of the architect Bartolomeo Ammanati, or muse and sitter to Agnolo Bronzino. Recent trends have transformed this situation, however, with a growing interest in Petrarchism as a site of social negotiation and exchange, and an increasing openness toward non-erotic subgenres such as occasional verse and religious lyric. Battiferra, primarily active in these genres, is well-placed to benefit from both these [End Page 163] trends. Along with selections from the Primo libro and Sette salmi, Kirkham's edition contains much important unpublished material, drawn primarily from a 1580s manuscript in the Biblioteca Casanatense in Rome, containing what was clearly projected as an edition of Battiferra's collected works. This makes available Battiferra's very interesting late religious poetry, which pursues the project of a devotionally-"converted" Petrarchism essayed in the Sette salmi. It also reveals the extent of her willingness to expand beyond established "feminine" genres: one of the "finds" of the edition is the opening of an ottava rima biblical epic (256–65), presumably dating from the end of her life. Equally intriguing, though dating from the other end of Battiferra's poetic trajectory, is a series of mourning lyrics for her first husband (d. 1549), interesting, not least as a document of Vittoria Colonna's formative influence on her early career (192–201).

In her critical positioning of Battiferra, Kirkham is keen to distance herself from the tendency to consider sixteenth-century female-authored lyric as a tradition apart: a "virtual matroneum" that has had the effect of "isolating [Battiferra] from the cultural mainstream where once she thrived" (53). While this perhaps implies a false dichotomy, one value of this volume is certainly the breadth of roles and relationships in which it displays Battiferra: as academician of the Intronati of Siena, as religious patron of the Florentine Jesuits, as courtly encomiast of the Medici, as imitator of Della Casa, Colonna, and Bernardo Cappello, and as poetic correspondent of Varchi, Caro, and Gabriele Fiamma. The range of Battiferra's contacts and the extent of her reputation in her own lifetime are richly illustrated in Kirkham's section on "Poems from Other Collections." The volume also contains translations of Battiferra's letters to Varchi, her prose Orison on the Birth of Christ, and her wills.

As inevitably in a work of this scope, occasional slips and omissions may be noted: the mysterious "Schioppa" (27, n. 48) is Laura Brenzone Schioppo (ca. 1474–1532); Lucia Bertani's exchange with Battiferra is not lost, but survives (ms. Casanatense 897), and it would have been useful to identify the metrically virtuosic late sonnet Quel che la Terra feo di nulla e 'l Cielo as a sonetto continuo (see Ossola and Segre, eds., Poesia del Cinquecento [2001], 273). More substantially, further discussion of Battiferra's religious position would have been helpful: although the possibility of reformist sympathies, much stressed by Guidi, is raised in passing (42), Kirkham does not fully integrate this with her insistence elsewhere on Battiferra's militant Catholic orthodoxy. It would be grudging, however, to end this review on anything other than a note of wholehearted celebration. Kirkham's edition of Battiferra is an impressive and revelatory achievement, admirably combining monumental scholarly range and editorial rigor with elegance of presentation and lightness of touch.

Virginia Cox
New York University

Share