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Epilogue Non di picciolo biasmo degno io mi farei presso coloro [che] lo sanno non facendo noto al mondo la valorosita d’alcune Gentildonne Sanesi meritevoli di eterna lode. —Stefano Guazzo, Cronica (1553) The flowering of women poets in Siena in the mid-sixteenth century is both exceptional and exciting. Certainly other Sienese women, in previous times, had contributed to the intellectual life of the city and, in some cases, Italy—the most famous being Caterina Benincasa, better known as Saint Catherine of Siena (1347–80), whose hundreds of letters and Dialogue of Divine Providence are among some of the most important literary and religious documents of the late fourteenth century. The sudden appearance on the literary landscape of Siena of an entire group of women who engaged not only with fellow kinswomen but also with male and female literary, political, and ecclesiastical figures is, however, a novelty in the Italian cultural scene. The closest parallel one might draw is with the circle of d’Avalos and Colonna women on the island of Ischia in the 1520s and 1530s, recently studied by Diana Robin in her groundbreaking volume Publishing Women: Salons, the Presses, and the Counter-Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy (2007).1 As I had occasion to write before, 215 It was here [on Ischia] that in the 1520s–30s Costanza d’Avalos, duchess of Francavilla (d. 1541), established a salon frequented by learned men and intelligent women that fostered the intellectual growth and development of four incredible young women closely related to one another—the sisters Giovanna d’Aragona Colonna (1502–75) and Maria d’Aragona d’Avalos (1503–68) and their sisters-in-law Vittoria Colonna d’Avalos (1490–1547) and Giulia Gonzaga Colonna (1513–66). Costanza’s salon was also the catalyst that in the 1530s–40s spawned five different salons in cities such as Naples, Rome, Viterbo, Ferrara, and Milan/Pavia, each directed by one of the founding d’Avalos/Colonna women and each thoroughly engaged in the cultural, religious, philosophical and political debates of the time. Each of these salons also served as a cell for the dissemination throughout Italy of religious reformist ideas drawn primarily from Juan de Valdés, but also, to a lesser degree, from transalpine reformers such as Jean Calvin or Martin Luther, ideas that the Roman Church soon declared heretical.2 Influential and groundbreaking as these “salons” (to use Diana Robin’s word) might have been, they served primarily as incubators and catalysts for the intellectual and spiritual development of their participants ; they did not inspire their female members to engage poetically with their male counterparts and thus to produce their own corpus of poetry—except, of course, in the case of Vittoria Colonna, who, alone of the four women, did compose poetry and did see it circulate widely in her own time. Vittoria’s poetic works were published as a collection first in 1538 and then twelve more times before her death in 1547, on each occasion apparently without her authorization.3 Vittoria is thus an exception in that network of women emanating from Costanza d’Avalos ’s “salon” on Ischia, so she remains a unique case among the other female participants in that special Neapolitan moment. The case for Siena is different. Admittedly, the Sienese women did serve as catalysts for men’s projects, such as the group translation of Virgil ’s Aeneid 1–6, and as participants in male-authored dialogues, such as Marc’Antonio Piccolomini’s “Se è da credersi che una donna . . .”; but, for the most part, they remained firmly anchored to their traditional role as muses for men’s poetry and as dedicatees of men’s writings. At the 216 T H E S W O R D A N D T H E P E N same time, however, we note that some of these Sienese women contributed in a new and significant manner to the cultural life of their city by participating, firsthand and with unusual energy, in the literary process , composing verses of their own and sharing them with their male counterparts. So we find in Siena the emergence of a poetic dialogue between men and women, and between the women themselves, that was not present on Ischia or, as far as we can tell at this time, elsewhere on the peninsula. What becomes clear, then, is that in Siena we are dealing not with a virtual “salon,” as Diana Robin has described for Ischia, but with a virtual...

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