5 - Religious Lyric

Summary

Abstract

This chapter examines religious lyric from approximately 1530 to 1630, from the birth of the spiritual canzoniere with Vittoria Colonna to the definitive edition of Angelo Grillo's landmark Pietosi affetti. Mixing devotion with desire, spiritual Petrarchists looked to incite readers to religious fervour using imagery that could be sensuous, erotic, or even perverse. In the Counter-Reformation in particular, this verse became increasingly corporeal and gender-ambiguous: sensual blazons of the body of Mary Magdalene; male-authored impersonations of saintly women; fantasies of touching, kissing, or penetrating Christ's wounds. Such verse is evidence of writers’ exploration of the surprising space between gender norms that was opened up by the Counter-Reformation.

Keywords: rime spirituali; riscrittura; Gabriele Fiamma; Girolamo Malipiero; Michelangelo; Isabella Morra

Singing my grace and Your pain, perhaps I will become, in so great a sea, a siren.

‒ Angelo Grillo

Petrarch needed to be purged. There was widespread agreement on this opinion during the Counter-Reformation. One famous anonymous letter submitted to the Congregation of the Index during the pontificate of Pope Gregory XIII (1572–1585) described Petrarch as dux et magister spurcarum libidinum—“guide and teacher of filthy lust.” Concern was not limited to the censors. The religious poet Gabriele Fiamma (c. 1533–1585) announced in the prefatory letter to his influential Rime spirituali (1570) his plan to cleanse poetry of its impurities, stating that “although [Petrarch’s] words are not shameful, they are however amorous, and like tinder to a fire,” one that might engulf young readers in flame. But curing the fever and fire of Petrarchism turned out not to be so simple. Such poetry was simply too popular. And so carnal lyric appetites were not eradicated in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries so much as redirected: they were channeled into religious verse. The role of the lyric beloved came increasingly to be filled not by Laura lookalikes, but by Christ, Mary, and the saints. The present chapter explores how Petrarchism—and the fluid perception of gendering for both poet and beloved—evolved as amorous and spiritual lyric melded.