2 - Context: Men and Women Writers in Late-Renaissance Italy

Summary

Abstract

A variety of sociopolitical, domestic, and cultural factors enabled early modern Italy's uniquely cooperative culture, by which male and female poets were able to share the literary arena. Synthesizing the most important historical and literary studies of early modern gender from the last three decades, this chapter describes how social changes dovetailed with the rise of print culture in Italy, creating a situation in which women could enter into dialogue with men in manuscript and print. The focus here is on the late Cinquecento and early Seicento (about which significantly less has been written than earlier periods), an examination of a generation of writers who had only ever known a world in which women published in significant numbers alongside men.

Keywords: Francesca Turina; Capoleone Ghelfucci; Counter-Reformation; masculinity; education; friendship

For like Caeneus, I have changed sex and form, but not desire.

‒ Capoleone Ghelfucci

The last chapter closed with Pietro Bembo and Vittoria Colonna, progenitors of the Petrarchist movement. This chapter picks up with a poet born shortly after their deaths in 1547. Francesca Turina Bufalini (1553–1641) was a poet of domestic and spiritual verse active in the late Cinquecento and early Seicento. In recent years, Turina has begun to garner scholarly attention, especially for her autobiographical verse, much of which describes her affective bonds for her parents, husband, children, and grandchildren. Another important personal relationship serves to frame the current chapter: Turina's friendship with the writer Capoleone Ghelfucci (1541–1600). Compatriots of Umbria and taken by a common religious fervor, Turina and Ghelfucci developed an abiding creative and spiritual bond. The two traded letters and poems. They encouraged and commented on each other's writing, especially her romance, “Il Florio,” and his religious epic, the Rosario della Madonna (1600). Around the end of the sixteenth century, Ghelfucci compiled for Turina an amorous canzoniere, a manuscript that is now preserved in the Biblioteca Comunale of Arezzo.

One sonnet from this manuscript collection is a particularly suggestive text with which to think through the poets’ relationship, and by extension, the nature of the broader dialogue between male and female poets of this generation in Italy—how the conversation around gender, spoken in the language of Petrarchism, continued to evolve from where we left off in the previous chapter.