None of this very careful and exquisite praise of Vittoria’s gifts had anything to do, however, with what happened when Pirogallo’s collation of her sonnets arrived in Viotti’s shop in Parma. From this moment on, the sonnets were no longer Vittoria’s private property, to be shared and exchanged within her coterie circles. They became commodities. Compositors set the text from the two trays, or cases, of type (hence our use of the terms “uppercase” and “lowercase” letters, to indicate the higher or lower of the two cases). Others laid the galleys in wooden forms. Battitori and tiratori, or beaters and pullers, applied the ink to the press and pulled the bar. The damp pages were hung to dry overnight (the press worked better when the sheets were wet), and then folded and cut to the designated size. After the pages were assembled in the right order, others wrapped them tightly in heavy paper, and marked on the front the book’s title and the number of copies included. These bundles were then packed in barrels or wooden caskets also wrapped with waxed cloth, and then sent off to be shipped either by land or by sea.
The books’ travel to their destinations was also complex. Because Italy was not a unified country, every boundary crossed, from one city or principality to another, had its own tolls and customs to be paid. A bookseller traveling from Bologna to Milan in 1497 described paying fees to cross the Panaro, Secchia, Taro, Enza, Po, and Lambro Rivers, and to pass in and out of the city gates of Parma, Piacenza, Pavia, and Cremona. Once the books arrived in cities throughout the peninsula, there were multiple places where they were sold. The most obvious was the bookshop, which was already a standard feature of Renaissance cities. Larger cities had specific districts known for bookselling, which were usually separate from where the books were being printed. In Rome, bookshops filled the area around the Campo dei Fiori; in Venice, they were clustered along the Mercerie. The booksellers displayed their wares both in their windows and on tables outside their doors, with the hopes of attracting foot traffic. Beyond the designated bookstores, there were also informal stalls in most Italian towns rather like the stands we find today in piazzas or along the banks of rivers; these stalls typically sold whatever volumes happened to have come the owner’s way. Books were sold as well in many cartolerie, or stationery stores, and from peddlers who traveled through the town with books in baskets or trays. There are even records of peddlers who sold books by attaching them to the ends of long sticks.
“Books,” however, is not necessarily the right term for what was being sold, or at least the books did not usually take the form that we imagine today—that is, an object with a front and back cover, with bound pages in between. In the sixteenth century, most books were sold as loose pages, without any binding. There is no record of what the unbound pages of Vittoria’s Rime sold for, but based on printers’ catalogs and inventories from the period, a rough estimate of the cost would be fifteen soldi, the daily wages for a skilled laborer. The binding was an entirely separate cost—it was an accessory, similar to the frame you might choose for a painting. Depending on how much money the buyer wanted to spend, he or she could choose from different qualities of leather for a hardbound book, or from a range of vellum and parchment for a softbound book. Wealthy collectors often preferred to buy their books unbound in order to match the new bindings to the rest of their collection—this is why so many beautiful private libraries look as if all of the books were bound at the same time. Less wealthy readers often bought several different books as loose pages and then bound them together. This helps to explain the miscellaneous materials that often make up a single volume from this period: a cookbook might be combined with a spiritual manual and several political treatises. The Houghton Library at Harvard has a 1539 edition of Vittoria’s Rime, for example, which was bound with a 1536 Italian translation of the Latin poet Horace. This particular reader must have been interested in keeping his or her preferred poetry together.
Wherever it was purchased and however it was bound, there was nothing remotely personal about the presentation of Vittoria’s poems once they became the Rime de la divina Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa di Pescara. The world of the sonnets hand-delivered by Giovio to Bembo at the congress in Bologna, or warmly recited by Isabella d’Este’s gentlewoman in the elegant rooms of the palace in Ferrara, was far away indeed. There is no record of Vittoria’s reaction to seeing her poems in print for the first time, but we know something about her feelings from a letter that Bembo wrote to her secretary Gualteruzzi on November 8, 1538. Bembo, who at this point regarded himself as Vittoria’s literary adviser—the two had become increasingly close, and he took a lively interest in her poems—was horrified by the book’s appearance, and he minced no words in saying so: “You should know of the injury and villainy done to the Signora Marchesa di Pescara by whoever printed her poetry most incorrectly and with the worst form and paper. About which she has sweetly written to me, not only not regretting it but also saying that she deserved it for worrying about vain things.” What exactly Vittoria meant by “vain things” (“vane cose”) is not clear, but most likely she was referring to the sheer act of writing so many secular poems, a project that she had come to renounce. We will remember how she opened the spiritual sonnets:
Since my chaste love long kept my soul inflamed
with hope of fame, and nourished a serpent
in my breast, so that now I turn in pain
to our Lord, who is my only remedy,
may the holy nails now be my quills,
and may his precious blood now be my ink,
may my paper be his lifeless sacred flesh
so that I may record what he suffered.
The fact that she was not full of regrets about the publication of the poems did not, however, mean she was in favor of it. Instead, Bembo’s words suggest that Vittoria allowed her penitential side to take over, so that the printing of the poems seemed to her a just punishment for wasting her time in the first place. The published Rime became, in effect, an act of self-flagellation.
For his own part, Bembo was not upset that the poems had been published, but that the edition was so full of errors—and, adding insult to injury, printed on such poor paper. As he reported to Gualteruzzi, he had already written to Vittoria urging her to allow him personally to oversee a new edition:
I replied begging her to be content with sending me a corrected copy of the Rime, so that I could have them printed here in a nice manner. I have not had any response from her Ladyship about it, and I fear the letter did not pass into her hands. Thus if you would be content, dear friend, when she passes through Rome as I expect that she will do, to devise that she sends me these Rime of hers, so that I can amend the error of that sad thing … In any case it would be a great shame if they are not sent out in such a way that they are read exactly as they came out of that pilgrim’s genius. She should not say, “I don’t care about worldly glory,” because these are only words. Glory, which can come from good works, must not be disdained; on the contrary, it should be loved and treasured by all the saintliest souls.
A subsequent letter written to Gualteruzzi on December 7 suggests that Vittoria had agreed to allow a new version to be printed: “Please kiss the hand of the Signora Marchesa di Pescara in my name and thank her for coming around to the idea of giving you a copy of the poems to print there [in Rome]. They should not have been hidden and neglected, but rather adorned with gold and jewels, and left in this way to make themselves known in the world.” But Vittoria’s mind, it appears, was only fleetingly changed. Four days later, Bembo wrote Gualteruzzi a letter that betrayed signs of real frustration, if not outright anger: “But I will not permit for any reason her failing to give me the copy of her Rime to print there. And I beg you above all to get these to come out correctly and nicely.” Despite the strength of Bembo’s pleas, his demands seem to have gone unanswered, and the poems were never presented either to him or to Gualteruzzi for an authorized publication. The following year, a new unauthorized edition appeared in Parma, with the claim on its title page o
f being a “corrected” version, although the revisions were minimal, and certainly not initiated by Vittoria. Most egregiously, the title page boasted of a new additional set of poems (“le sue stanze”), but the stanzas were written by another poet, Veronica Gambara. This edition was only the first of four new editions issued in 1539: two from Viotti’s shop, one whose printer remains unknown, and one from the well-known Nicolò di Aristotile, known as il Zoppino, who usually worked in Venice but printed Vittoria’s poems in Florence. In the Zoppino edition, the title page highlighted the inclusion of sixteen spiritual sonnets that were placed at the beginning of the volume (six of these had in fact appeared in the earlier collection), and also boasted that the poems had been reviewed “with the greatest diligence.” Although the revisions were not so extensive as Zoppino claimed, the volume does show signs of some genuine editorial work.
The multiple editions of the Rime issued in 1539 were followed by yet another edition in 1540, published under the supervision of Zoppino in Venice. This volume included twelve new spiritual sonnets, as well as a poem on the triumph of Christ on the cross. By the time of Vittoria’s death in 1547, a total of twelve editions of the Rime had been published—twelve editions in the space of nine years—and nine more were issued before the end of the century. There is no record of the print runs for any of them, but in the year 1500, the average print run in Venice was a thousand books, and a small shop such as Viotti’s probably published somewhere between four hundred and five hundred copies per edition. Whatever the number of copies sold, the sheer fact of the book’s nearly constant reprinting gives us a good sense of its success. Vittoria’s Rime was a Renaissance bestseller.
The popularity of the Rime did nothing, however, to change Vittoria’s mind about seeing her poems in print. In the fall of 1546, she complained to Donato Rullo—a friend of Ascanio’s and an agent of the Colonna family in Venice, who was involved in editing her poems—about the new book of her spiritual sonnets issued by the famous Venetian printing house of Vincenzo Valgrisi. In a letter to Ascanio, Rullo related that Vittoria had chastised him for not having stopped the press. “Your most illustrious sister, and my patron,” he wrote, “has turned against me, because I gave the poems to the press to print, or because I did not prohibit it.” It is hard to believe that Vittoria did not have the power in 1546 to prevent her poems from being printed. She was, after all, a formidable person with powerful connections—how many other women were in regular correspondence with both the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor?—and after one or two pirated editions, things surely could have been brought to a halt. Moreover, apart from her self-punishing comment to Bembo about deserving the publication of her “vain things” and the complaint to Rullo some eight years later, there are no traces of her either resisting or resenting the printed Rime.
The only possible hint of an intervention against her appearance in print surfaced in a minor collection of poems that was found in the late nineteenth century in the great Biblioteca Estense (the Este family library) in Modena. The title of the book, Opera nova non più posta in luce nella quale troverai molto bellissimi Sonetti di diversi Eccelentissimi ingegni, or New works never before seen in which you will find many of the most beautiful sonnets by a range of most excellent talents, specified the special addition of certain sonnets of the “divina Vittoria Colonna,” which, it boasted, were “never before seen by anyone.” And yet, inside the volume, Vittoria’s poems are nowhere to be found. Perhaps it was simply a marketing ploy to attract buyers, or perhaps the printer had hoped to obtain copies of the new poems but failed to do so. Whatever happened with this peculiar little book, it stands out as Vittoria’s single triumph over the medium of print.
At the same time that the Rime was being printed in multiple editions, there were still readers coveting manuscript copies of Vittoria’s poems. It is hard today fully to grasp the profound difference that existed in Renaissance Italy between the elite, coterie readership of private manuscripts and the public audience of print. Even if someone like Castiglione, for example, complained that Vittoria had shared his manuscript too freely, the number of people reading copies of The Courtier within Vittoria’s circle of friends in Naples did not remotely compare with the vast and completely uncontrollable readership he acquired once The Courtier was published. In the sixteenth century, there were in effect two separate systems operating simultaneously, catering to very different sets of demands. Thus when Vittoria’s poems were printed, the desire among her friends to have them in manuscript did not by any means abate. Anyone with money could purchase a printed book, but only those with personal connections could obtain an authorized handwritten copy.
The best example of this double system comes in an exchange between Francesco della Torre, the secretary of Vittoria’s friend Giberti, and Gualteruzzi in 1540. At this point, della Torre could have chosen from at least five printed editions of the Rime, but he wrote to Gualteruzzi to request a manuscript copy. Della Torre did not even acknowledge the existence of the printed books: in his letter to Gualteruzzi, he mentioned that he had heard about a collection of Vittoria’s “many very beautiful sonnets” from his friend the Sienese ambassador Lattanzio Tolomei, as if the poems were a well-kept secret. Gualteruzzi granted della Torre’s request, and sent him a manuscript of the poems. In his letter of thanks, della Torre promised not to circulate the poems, “since,” he declared, “I would not want such rare compositions to be in any other hands than my own,” and promised he would return the manuscript to Gualteruzzi as soon as he had copied it in its entirety. Although the exact contents of della Torre’s manuscript are not known—there is debate among scholars as to which manuscript he actually received—one of the likeliest candidates, a manuscript now in Florence, contains one hundred poems, ninety of which had already appeared in the 1538 Rime. Thus the idea that the poems were “rare” would only have made sense in a universe that refused to recognize the existence of print.
While della Torre and his circle were still clinging to the notion that Vittoria’s poems needed to be copied out by hand, the printed editions of her Rime were making literary history. Up to this time, individual poems by women had been included in collections of men’s poetry—Vittoria’s sonnet appearing in Bembo’s 1535 Rime is a good example—but there had never before been a single-authored book of poetry written by a woman. This was a watershed moment, and the history of Italian women’s writing can be divided between before and after the publication of Vittoria’s poems.
In the wake of Vittoria’s Rime, scores of Italian women poets began to publish their poems. Some of them came from backgrounds similar to Vittoria’s, but there was a marked shift in the mid-sixteenth century away from the aristocratic women who were popular in manuscript circles—the most famous of whom, Gambara, saw her poems appear only in collections of other poets’—toward a new group of women from decidedly different worlds. Gaspara Stampa, one of the most celebrated female poets of the mid-sixteenth century, was the daughter of a jeweler in Padua; Laura Terracina, whose Rime was issued from the prestigious Giolito house in Venice starting in 1548, was an impoverished gentlewoman; Tullia d’Aragona, whose poems were first published in 1547 also by the Venetian Gabriele Giolito, was by vocation a courtesan, even if she claimed to have noble blood. (D’Aragona was in fact so impressive intellectually that the duke of Florence, Cosimo I de’ Medici, excused her from having to wear the yellow veil required of all sex workers due to her “rare knowledge of poetry and philosophy.”) The fact that both Terracina’s and d’Aragona’s publications appeared within a year of Vittoria’s death was probably not a coincidence: the market had opened up for a new woman poet to fill Vittoria’s place.
Many of these women explicitly modeled themselves as Vittoria’s heirs. Already during Vittoria’s lifetime, Gambara had written a sonnet to her that began, “O unique glory of our present age.” “Our sex,” she declared, “should raise to you a noble temple / As in the past to Pallas and to Phoebus, / Built of rich marble
and of finest gold.”* Many other tributes followed, but perhaps the most interesting was from a much younger writer from Venice, Maddalena Campiglia, who was born six years after Vittoria’s death. In Campiglia’s 1588 play, Flori, the female protagonist, who is filled with dreams of her own literary immortality, exclaims to her friend: “Come set yourself like me on that path on which one sole immortal woman has ventured, the most VICTORIOUS and DIVINE among all those of our sex who have attained fame and glory.” Vittoriosa e Divina: Divine Vittoria.
The second landmark publication for Italian women writers after Vittoria’s Rime was an anthology of women’s poetry published in 1559 by the famous Venetian editor Lodovico Domenichi. Entitled Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime, et virtuosissime donne (Assorted poems by some of the most noble and the most virtuous women), this was the first anthology ever dedicated to women’s verse. The volume had a total of 316 poems, including 26 of Vittoria’s; there were 54 women represented in all (the volume also included 14 poems by men, but only because they formed parts of dialogues with women authors). Domenichi, who in 1552 had published an anthology of male Neapolitan poets, represented himself here as a champion of women’s writing. “I was determined,” he wrote in the dedicatory letter, “to find whatever way I could to make them public to the world through the medium of print, to show those who are in doubt of the greatness of female ingenio [intellect or talent].”
Thanks in part to the success of Domenichi’s anthology, roughly two hundred women in Italy had their poems appear in print by the end of the sixteenth century. To give some sense of how significant this number was: in France, there were thirty published women poets; in Germany, there were twenty. In England—and this was exactly the period of Elizabeth I, who was herself a talented translator and poet—the figure was seventeen. It is hard to believe that Italy was so far ahead of its northern European peers, but this was unambiguously the case. And Vittoria had led the way.
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