A Companion to Vittoria Colonna

Historians fill in the context of Colonna (1490-1547) both as a literary practitioner of the first order, admired by her peers for elegantly emulating the Petrarchan style at the same time she pushed beyond it; and as a historical protagonist who was closely engaged with some of the primary religious and cultural debates of her age. Recent scholarship has focused attention on her as a genre-defining secular woman writer of the Italian Renaissance, whose literary model helped establish a decorous and wholly assimilated voice for women writers within the Italian literary panorama. Annotation ©2016 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)