Rethinking Vittoria Colonna: Gender and desire in the rime amorose

Though the rime spirituali of Vittoria Colonna (1490-1547) have benefited in recent years from increased critical examination, her rime amorose have gone largely unstudied. This lack of attention is due at least in part to a lack of excitement, as modern scholarship has come to consider her early secular verse to be competent but conventional, a brand of Petrarchism that is at once passively receptive and abstractly decorporealizing. This essay aims to show that Colonna's is a reputation unjustly earned and that her rime amorose are not as 'traditional' or frigid as has typically been posited. On the contrary, her verse can be wonderfully bizarre and experimental, especially in terms of gender and sexuality.