The Space Between: Poetics of Piety in Early Modern Italy

Abstract

This academic monograph considers the ways in which male and female poets of the introspective devotional lyric engaged the Word in text, image, and imagination in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Combining diachronic and synchronic analyses of devotional verse, this study examines the relations between spiritual life and poetic expression in the long sixteenth century through the prism of the threefold Word and the perspective of vernacular theology. This book reveals an incarnational cultural project rooted in an interstitial mode of existence for which Mary, the saints, and the apostles served as models: a condition of being and an experience of relating to self, divine, and world in ‘between spaces’ within and without that reflect the emergence of a new conception of selfhood consistent with the ideals of spiritual autonomy and agency enshrined in the Ignatian fundamentum.

Description

The Space Between: Poetics of Piety in Early Modern Italy considers the ways in which male and female poets of the introspective devotional lyric engaged the Word in text, image, and imagination in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Combining diachronic and synchronic analyses of early modern Italian verse, this book examines relations between spiritual life and poetic expression in the long sixteenth century (1500–1630): a period of religious reforms and reformations marked by the emergence of Protestantism (1517), the establishment of Holy Office of the Roman Inquisition (1542), the inauguration of the Council of Trent (1545–1563), the creation of the Index of Forbidden Books (1559), the institution of the Sacred Congregation of the Index (1571), and by dramatic changes in lay piety and cultural forms.

This study has three aims. First, to expand our understanding of the Italian devotional lyric, its contours, and its evolution in the long sixteenth century. Second, to proffer a more nuanced understanding of early modern spirituality. Third, to contribute original and elucidating analyses of early modern verse that convey the character, depth, and richness of early modern female poetry while offering novel readings of well-known and celebrated poets such as Vittoria Colonna (1490–1547) in addition to first readings of lesser-known poets such as Francesca Turini Bufalini (1553–1641) and Semidea Poggi (1560s?–1637). 

The Space Between is tripartite in structure. Each of its three sections comprises two chapters. The physical form of the monograph reflects its subject matter. Each part of this study centers on one of the three immanent expressions of the transcendent divine in the Christian tradition: the Bible as Word of God, Christ as the Word made Flesh, and nature and the cosmos as the created world brought into being by God and reflecting Him.

Part one, “The Book of Scripture: Reading and Writing the Word,” investigates inspirational encounters, both textual and spiritual, of lyric poets with the Scriptures, and considers Holy Writ as a devotional instrument. The chapters in this section identify the subtle but diffuse presence of Mary and Mariological discourses at the heart of the period’s largely Christocentric piety and lyric poetry, and reveal a poetics shaped by Marian metaphors, epithets, and typological imagery that reflects Catholic habits of religious reading and devotion mimetic of the Virgin Annunciate.

Christ is the subject of part two, “The Book of Life: Contemplating and Conceiving the Word.” This section considers the Son of God as a divine bridge, mirror, and object of contemplation, and examines lyric descriptions of early modern encounters with the image of Christ, both real and imagined, direct and mediated. These chapters emphasize image and imagination as sites of revelation and instruments of elevation. They show how intimacy is figured as erotic encounter, holiness is depicted as feminized beauty, and repentance is understood as the conversion of carnal to sacred yearning in devotional poetics of the Counter Reformation in Italy.

With part three, “The Book of Creation: Encountering and Responding to the Word,” this study turns to the created world and to narrations and representations of spiritual experience in nature or mediated by the natural world. Attention is given to descriptions of garden and wilderness spaces and to the heavens, the stars, and the night sky in particular. Analysis of lyric representations of divine immanence and sacramentality in these chapters reveals an emphasis on the conception of the God-human relationship as one of call and response.