Innovation in the Italian Counter-Reformation

Shannon McHugh, Anna Wainwright

• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781644531884, 9781644531877
• eBook ISBN: 9781644531891
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Italian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The enduring "black legend" of the Italian Counter-Reformation, which has held sway in both scholarly and popular culture, maintains that the Council of Trent ushered in a cultural dark age in Italy, snuffing out the spectacular creative production of the Renaissance. As a result, the decades following Trent have been mostly overlooked in Italian literary studies, in particular. The thirteen essays of Innovation in the Italian Counter-Reformation present a radical reconsideration of literary production in post-Tridentine Italy. With particular attention to the much-maligned tradition of spiritual literature, the volume's contributors weave literary analysis together with religion, theater, art, music, science, and gender to demonstrate that the literature of this period not only merits study but is positively innovative. Contributors include such renowned critics as Virginia Cox and Amedeo Quondam, two of the leading scholars on the Italian Counter-Reformation.Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide byRutgers University Press.

PART I

Foundations

VIRGINIA COX

Re-Thinking Counter-Reformation Literature

Ascholarly cliché apt to arouse skepticism in the reader is that of describing the subject of one’s research as “curiously neglected.” For the neglect to merit the adjective “curious,” the subject in question must have a reasonable claim to be of compelling interest. In a heavily populated scholarly tradition, the likelihood of such a topic remaining genuinely neglected is slim.

This essay, however, discusses one such case, a very strident one indeed: an instance of sustained critical neglect so striking and peculiar as to make “curious” a radical understatement. What is under discussion here is no less than the effective critical “disappearing” of an entire, quite substantial, and historically important literary tradition: that portion of late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian literature that happens to be religious in its subject matter. This is a body of writing encompassing lyric, narrative, and dramatic texts in considerable numbers, including works of high literary quality, much appreciated in their day. It was the product of a remarkable collective initiative of religious riscrittura, of notable cultural-historical interest, yet it remained the object of virtually unalleviated critical silence from the Risorgimento down to the turn of the present century. When this literature was studied in the twentieth century, it was almost inevitably within the context of religious studies rather than literature. Only since the millennium has a sustained tradition of literary analysis of this vast body of work begun to appear.

An instance of critical oblivion so protracted and wholesale must become an interesting object of scrutiny in itself. My aims in this essay are thus two. The first is to illustrate the value and interest of this lost segment of Italian literary history. The second is to address the question of why it should have been so comprehensively lost.

It will be useful, as a first move, to define more closely the body of literature that interests us here, which is quite a specific one. We are concerned here with literary works produced from around the 1560s onward, though with a notable acceleration beginning in the 1580s, mainly within the genres of lyric poetry, verse narrative, tragedy, and comedy. This literature takes religious material as its subject matter, primarily hagiographic and biblical in the case of the narrative and dramatic genres. It is an elite tradition rather than a popular one, although popular religious literature also flourished at this time. Finally, the defining feature of this literature, and the characteristic that lends it peculiar interest: this is religious writing that self-consciously models itself on a preceding tradition of secular literature or, more precisely, on a series of secular genre traditions that had evolved or come to maturity in the early sixteenth century—Petrarchist lyric, classicizing tragedy and comedy, vernacular and Neo-Latin epic, and chivalric romance. The imitation is very close, and clearly intended to be recognized, encompassing both macroscopic stylistic and structural features, and appropriations of individual episodes, topoi, theatergrams, and character types. It differs from mainstream humanistic imitatio, which it otherwise resembles, by virtue of its attitude of aggressive revisionism. At the extreme, it seeks not merely to rewrite a previous tradition but to overwrite it, to write it out of existence. I have elsewhere termed this revisionist imitation a process of conversion, intended in both the banal sense of an adaptation of an object from its original intended use to another, and in the profounder, religious sense of a spiritual “turning.”¹ The two senses, in this case, coincide.

That this “converted” literature is the product of the newly evangelizing culture of the Counter-Reformation would seem an obvious hypothesis at first sight; certainly it is in the period following the closure of the Council of Trent in 1563 that the greatest flourishing of this literature may be found. Looking into the origins of this literature, however, it is clear that it may be traced to a time well before Trent. The first experiment in humanist hagiographic epic, Maffeo Vegio’s Antoniad, dates from the 1430s, relatively early in the trajectory of Italian humanism.² A strong tradition of Latin religious epic followed in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, culminating in Iacopo Sannazaro’s De partu virginis (published in 1526, after a decades-long process of composition and revision) and Marco Girolamo Vida’s Christiad (published in 1535, although written between around 1518 and 1530).³ Within the same broad tradition of humanistic religious writings, we may point to the Latin hymns of Giovanni Pontano (De laudibus divinis) and Angelo Poliziano, to Ugolino Verino’s religious epigrams, or to the remarkable series of humanist hagiographical writings to which Alison Knowles Frazier has recently called attention.⁴ The impetus behind this writing is well expressed in a passage in Josse Bade’s preface to his commentary on Baptista Mantuanus’s popular 1481 epic, Partenice prima, sive Mariana. Bade ventriloquizes the frustration felt by his projected pious adolescent readership at the lack of a modern Christian literary tradition capable of matching the stylistic refinement of the ancients: “Will no one gloss for us a work so polished, so brilliant, so copious, so eloquent, so adorned with all the graces? Shall we always be reading pagans and not a single Christian?”⁵

More than to the Counter-Reformation, then, we should probably trace the origins of the conversional impulse in sixteenth-century Italian literature to a rather different phenomenon. It seems, essentially, an organic consequence of the radical stylistic renovatio of Italian literature effected by humanism, first in Latin, then in the vernacular. Until the later fifteenth century, this classicizing shift had affected principally secular-themed literature, with the result that a notable formal discrepancy had developed between the secular and religious traditions of literature, one especially obvious in a genre such as hymnody, where we see Pontano and Poliziano precociously at work. The impulse to close this gap was inevitable, given the pervasiveness of religious sentiment in this period and the centrality of religion within culture. A situation in which high-quality, stylistically avant-garde religious art and music was being produced, but without a comparable tradition of religious literature, had clearly come to seem anomalous to some writers well before the opening of the Council of Trent.

Although the motivation of the literary development discussed in this essay is clear, the chronology is relatively complex and varies genre by genre. Within vernacular lyric poetry, the foundation of the genre of Petrarchist rime spirituali can be identified prior to Trent, in Girolamo Malipiero’s Il Petrarca spirituale (1536) and in Vittoria Colonna’s spiritual lyrics, again in circulation from the 1530s. Malipiero’s collection took the process of spiritual riscrittura quite literally, rewriting the individual poems of Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta one by one to convert them to a spiritual or moral meaning, a process sometimes referred to by the musicological term contrafactum.⁶ Colonna’s religious verse, while it can still be loosely described as a “conversion” of Petrarchism’s erotic language, models a freer, more creative and holistic process of religious imitatio.⁷ The growth of Petrarchist vernacular religious lyric was reasonably smooth after Colonna, whose religious verse was first published independently in 1546. The middle decades of the century saw an important phase of experimentation with vernacular psalm translations and the beginning of a new tradition of religious anthologies (from 1550). Thence progress was rapid: a search for rime spirituali within the title field of the online catalogue of sixteenth-century books in Italian libraries Edit16 yields nine results for the first half of the century (1500–1549)—all for editions of Colonna—and sixty-nine for the second half (1550–99), including forty-two in the last two decades alone.⁸

A similar pattern may be observed later, with the genre of the spiritual tragedy, which may be differentiated from the medieval sacra rappresentazione in its observance of a five-act structure and of the classical unities. Classicizing tragedies on religious subjects began to be authored in Latin, mainly by Jesuits, in the 1550s and 1560s and reached a wide audience, although few were initially published. The vernacular tradition followed, with four plays described in their titles as tragedie spirituali published between 1580 and 1599, and a further seventeen between 1600 and 1625, including the genre’s first best seller, the Franciscan Bonaventura Morone’s Il mortorio di Christo (1611), which went through twenty-three editions between 1600 and 1656.⁹ These figures only succeed in giving an approximate (and low) estimate of the extent of publications in this genre, since terminology was not consistent, with many tragedie spirtuali still being entitled sacre rappresentazioni. This is the case, for example, with most of the nineteen examples of martyrdom tragedies published by Giovanni Battista Ciotti in his Corona ouero ghirlanda di candidi gigli di virginità, e di sanguigne rose di martirî di diuersi santi e sante (1606). These are all modern “saints’ plays,” published individually between 1576 and 1604, then republished by Ciotti’s collaborator Marco Claseri in Serravalle in 1605, before being collected in Ciotti’s compendium. Twelve of the nineteen are entitled rappresentazione or sacra rappresentazione, yet the majority of these plays take the classicizing form of modern secular drama, with a five-act structure and a “realist” cast list, composed of human protagonists, without the intervention of allegorical abstractions, in the manner of medieval religious plays.

One reason for the persistence of the term rappresentazione within sacred drama may have been that it evaded the pro...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I: Foundations
• Part II: Gender
• Part III: Theater
• Part IV: Bologna: A City Case Study
• Part V: Emotion and Expression
• Contributors
• Index