Between Repentance and Desire: Women Poets and the Word in Early Modern Italy

Abstract

In early modern Italy, lyric poets of spiritual verse experimented with engaging and depicting the divine Word in novel ways. They aestheticized bodies, including that of Christ, and they imagined eroticized encounters between themselves and the Word made flesh. This article examines the sensual spiritual poetry of three early modern Italian women who, between 1530 and 1630, dedicated themselves to crafting and reinvigorating the poetic word and to expressing and (re)presenting the divine Word. Exploring the introspective and subjective spiritual lyrics of Vittoria Colonna (1492–1547), Laura Battiferri (1523–1589), and Francesca Turini Bufalini (1553–1641) in the context of the Italian literary Renaissance and Counter-Reformation, it aims to highlight and to elucidate the conflation of the sacred and the erotic in their verse. In so doing, this article reveals how these early modern female poets deployed the sensual strategically in their verse to elevate the erotic and how they raised the Italian religious lyric to new literary heights by spiritualizing the dominant poetic idiom.

1. Introduction

Together, the words “repentance” and “desire” convey both much and little about the landscape of Italian piety and poetry in the early modern period. A shorthand for both Christian devotion and the Italian lyric tradition, “between repentance and desire” points first and foremost to the tension between perceived base drives or actions and the possibility of remorse for them in individuals brought to contemplate themselves and the fate of their soul. The relationship between repenting and desiring in early modern Italian culture generally, and in pious contemplative practices and in the religious lyric specifically, was necessarily more complex than that of simple conflict, and its expressions and representations were much more nuanced.

Understood in the broadest sense, to repent could signify to regret, and not only sins or misdeeds; to desire could mean to wish or to want and need not have been sexual or blameworthy, even in a rigorously disciplined religious context. Just as repentance and desire could be conceived of in different ways, so too could their relationship. One could repent for, with, and because of desire as well as partially or in opposition to it, as a prayerful poetic appeal to the divine by Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) attests: “I wish I wanted, Lord, what I don’t want” (“Vorrei voler, Signor, quel ch’io non voglio”; G87, v.1) (Buonarroti 1991). Nearly two centuries before Michelangelo, Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304–1374) similarly confessed: “and I wish I wanted more, but I want no more” (“et vorrei più volere, et più non voglio”; Rvf 118, v. 10) (Petrarca 1976).

The defining poles of Petrarch’s inner world, which he staged in a songbook that became a model for sixteenth-century Italian poets, “repentance” and “desire” evoke the iconic struggle of his literary persona and the ideal trajectory from earthly to divine love suggested (but not completed) in his Canzoniere, especially as this trajectory was proposed and promoted by Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) in the Cinquecento.1 If “repentance” and “desire” bring to mind Petrarch and his Canzoniere, they also suggest the dense woods and winding paths of sixteenth-century Petrarchism, the tangled grove of spiritual Petrarchism, and the sylvan clearing in which a post-Petrarchist tradition first began to emerge in the 1570s—a field from which the flowers of Petrarch’s “scattered rhymes” (“rime sparse”; Rvf 1, v.1) continued to be plucked but whose soil proved infertile ground for songbooks and spiritual itineraries modeled after his Canzoniere.2

Capacious enough to embrace the full spectrum of Petrarchizing tendencies between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries (including those of Petrarch himself), the shorthand “between repentance and desire” also applies to medieval Italian poetry—a fact not at all surprising given the roots of the Italian literary tradition in the verse of Saint Francis of Assisi (d. 1226) and in the laude of religious writers and mystics such as Jacopone da Todi (c. 1230–1306). It is to the long and rich tradition of Italian spiritual and amorous lyric poetry and its expression in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries by women that this article turns.

Two related trends characterized the development of lyric poetry in the sixteenth century, especially in the decades following the Council of Trent (1545–1563): a rise in the production of religious verse and an increase in its sensuousness (Cox 2013, pp. 30–33). This article explores the introspective and subjective spiritual lyric composed by early modern Italian women between 1530 and 1630 in order to highlight and to elucidate the conflation of the sacred and the erotic in their verse. Devoted to crafting and reinvigorating the poetic word and to expressing and (re)presenting the divine Word, women writers such as Vittoria Colonna (1492–1547), Laura Battiferri (1523–1589), and Francesca Turini Bufalini (1553–1641) raised the Italian religious lyric to new literary heights by conferring spiritual loftiness to amorous verse. As this study will show, they deployed the sensual strategically in their verse to elevate the erotic and in so doing contributed to the elevation of Petrarch and of the lyric too.

The period between 1530 and 1630 in Italy is traditionally described as encompassing the respective eras of the Renaissance and of the “Counter-Reformation” or “Catholic Reformation.” If these historiographic terms have been submitted to just revision in multiple fields, in Italian literary studies, which remain behind the trend, no adequate substitutes have yet emerged.3 I thus follow in the footsteps of Virginia Cox and deploy the term “Counter-Reformation” nonideologically to denote the period in Italian literary history from 1560 to the 1630 (Cox 2011, pp. xxiii–xxiv). While it is beyond the scope of an article dedicated to illuminating a lyric subgenre to offer a complete history or overview of literature in the period, it has only recently become possible to imagine such a comprehensive treatment, let alone to conduct it. Despite the proliferation of spiritual writing in Italy in the final decades of the sixteenth century and the first decades of the seventeenth century—and the existence of some true literary masterpieces among them—scholars have only just begun to address this chapter of Italian literary history.4 This article seeks to contribute to that effort.

2. Petrarch and Spiritual Petrarchism

The tension between desire and repentance permeates Petrarch’s Canzoniere, from the poet’s expression of regret in the proemial sonnet for the errancy of his youth, when he was “in part another man” (“in parte altr’uom”; Rvf 1, v. 4), to his prayerful appeal to the Virgin Mary in the final canzone (Rvf 366). This conflict is not only apparent in the well-known first and final compositions of the collection but also throughout his lyrics. In poem 118, for example, Petrarch emphasizes being caught in a state of longing from which it has proven impossible for him to escape:

       Or qui son, lasso, et voglio esser altrove

   et vorrei più volere, et più non voglio,

   et per più non poter fo quant’ io posso;

       et d’antichi desir lagrime nove

   provan com’io son pur quel ch’i’ mi soglio,

   né per mille rivolte ancor son mosso.

(vv. 9–14)

Now here I am, alas, and wish I were elsewhere, and I wish I wished more, but wish no more, and, by being able to do more, do all I can; // and new tears for old desires show me to be still what I used to be, nor for a thousand turnings about have I yet moved.

(Trans. Robert M. Durling)

Despite tears and repeated efforts aimed at repentance and self-change, Petrarch remains the same man, with the same earthly desires, that he was in his youth. Sonnet Rvf 118 is the seventh of fifteen anniversary poems in the collection—compositions in memory of Petrarch’s supposed first meeting with Laura on Good Friday, 6 April 1327 (Rvf 211, vv. 12–14), and her death on that same day twenty-one years later, in 1348 (Rvf 336, vv. 12–14).5 The anniversary is an important feature and structuring principle of the Canzoniere that provided Petrarch with opportunities to recall, to recount, and to reimagine his first meeting with his unattainable beloved.

The object of longing and contemplation in the Canzoniere, Laura is both an historical figure and a beautiful fiction whom Petrarch grants poetic representations consonant with the linguistic and literary resonances of her name, most notably the homophone “l’aura” (“breeze” or “air”) and the cognate “lauro” (“laurel tree”)—the evergreen sacred to Apollo, the god of poetry and the frustrated would-be lover of Daphne in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (I: 438–567) (Ovid 1984).6 Representations of trees and of Apollo recur in Petrarch’s verse collection, where they possess multiple symbolic and spiritual affordances. In the Canzoniere, for example, the tree alludes not only to the laurel or to Laura but also to the Cross: a conceptual pairing in the religious tradition as well as a natural association for a poet-lover who claims to have met his beloved on the anniversary of Christ’s crucifixion.7

Christ is present throughout the Canzoniere in subtle and manifest ways. Petrarch compares Laura’s birth into a quiet corner of the world to that of Christ (Rvf 4) and describes her as His “true friend” (“vera amica”; Rvf 334, v. 14). In sonnet Rvf 81, he refers to Christ as “a great friend” (“un grande amico,” v. 5) who through “ineffable graciousness” (“ineffabil cortesia,” v. 6) “came to free [him]” (“venne a dilivrarmi,” v. 6). The poet also addresses Christ directly. In the anniversary sonnet Rvf 62, for example, Petrarch beseeches the “Father of Heaven” (“Padre del Ciel,” v. 1) to guide him back to a “different life” (“altra vita,” v. 6); he then appeals to Christ to “lead [his] wandering thoughts back to a better place” (“reduci i pensier vaghi a miglior loco,” v. 13) and “to remind them” (“rammenta lor,” v. 14) that on that very day He was “on the Cross” (“fusti in croce,” v. 14).

While religious references in the Canzoniere can be clear and explicit, Petrarch’s scriptural allusions are often quite subtle. In the tercets of Rvf 81, for example, after noting that Christ’s voice still echoes on earth, Petrarch combines biblical paraphrases from different passages in the New Testament, and presents them as reported speech in which the Word made flesh describes himself as the way for the weary; he then wonders how he might acquire wings like a dove that he might rise—a psalmic allusion.8 Sometimes the spiritual and scriptural evocations in Petrarch’s verses are so veiled or indirect that they go unnoticed even by specialists. This is the case of Petrarch’s Rvf 190.

In sonnet Rvf 190, Petrarch describes a visionary experience featuring the sudden appearance of a white doe with golden horns bearing shimmering words around its neck warning him to refrain from touching it because it has been liberated by Caesar:

        Una candida cerva sopra l’ erba

    verde m’ apparve con duo corna d’ oro,

    fra due riviere all’ ombra d’ un alloro,

    levando ‘l sole a la stagione acerba.

        Era sua vista sì dolce superba,

    ch’ i’ lasciai per seguirla ogni lavoro,

    come l’ avaro che ‘n cercar tesoro

    con diletto l’ affanno disacerba.

        “Nessun mi tocchi,” al bel collo d’ intorno

    scritto avea di diamanti et di topazi.

    “Libera farmi al mio Cesare parve.”

        Et era ‘l sol già vòlto al mezzo giorno,

    gli occhi miei stanchi di mirar, non sazi,

    quand’ io caddi ne l’ acqua et ella sparve.

A white doe on the green grass appeared to me, with two golden horns, between two rivers, in the shade of a laurel, when the sun was rising in the unripe season. // Her look was so sweet and proud that to follow her I left every task, like the miser who as he seeks treasure sweetens his trouble with delight. // “Let no one touch me,” she bore written with diamonds and topazes around her lovely neck. “It has pleased my Caesar to make me free.” // And the sun had already turned at midday: my eyes were tired by looking but not sated, when I fell into the water, and she disappeared.

(Trans. Robert M. Durling)

The key symbolic associations in this complex and multilayered vision have long been identified: the doe stands for Laura; the grass, for Vaucluse where Petrarch first spotted her (in Saint Claire Church in Avignon); and the two rivers, for those of Vaucluse—the Sorgue and the Durance. Caesar has been traditionally understood as an allusion to God. According to one of Petrarch’s sixteenth-century commentators, biblical translator Antonio Brucioli (1498–1566), Caesar denotes the God who had “freed” (“fatta libera”) Laura from “carnal concupiscence” (“concupiscentie carnali”), and it is for this reason that the poet was told to refrain from touching her (Petrarca 1548, f. 132r).

It is only recently that the Christological allusions in the sonnet have been identified, and the scriptural passages evoked in the text illuminated to reveal the redemptive dimension of the poem: the injunction to not touch the doe points to the Noli me tangere scene in John 20:17, in which the resurrected Christ appeared to Mary Magdalene by his tomb in the garden and bid her to refrain from holding on to Him; the cervid and water together suggest divine longing and Petrarch’s reading of Psalm 41:2 (Vulgate), “As the hart panteth after the fountains of water, so my soul panteth after thee, O God”9 (Morelli 2021; see also Pezzè 2019).

In the Christian tradition, water is the element and image associated with baptism and the Eucharist, the sacraments of life—a symbolism that has its roots in John 19:34 in which the Roman soldier Longinus opened Christ’s side with a spear and blood and water issued from the wound. Petrarch’s fall into the water in Rvf 190 thus suggests a baptism (Morelli 2021). In Rvf 190, Petrarch effectively casts himself in the role of Mary Magdalene as a lover-worshipper of the divine beloved, Christ.10 Far from being a purely carnal sonnet, it is also spiritual and theo-erotic. Reflecting the topos of the mystical marriage rooted in allegorical readings of the lovers in the Canticle of Canticles, the sonnet alludes to the relationship between the soul of the individual and God.

While the Canzoniere comprises a rich religious dimension, Petrarch’s followers in the early sixteenth century were most drawn to its amorous elements. For them, as the proliferation of the blazon in the period suggests, descriptions of Laura—her body and her beauty—became a favored topic of imitation, emulation, and parody, in part because of the social function that love poetry played in court settings and among the urban elite (Jossa 2015, p. 197). The social factors shaping the development of Petrarchism are reflected in the paths by which they became established in sixteenth-century Europe: epistolary exchange between individuals and within close social circles; the circulation of single-authored and authorized songbooks; and, later, the dissemination of lyric anthologies prepared by editors and printers motivated by a range of factors, including commercial gain.

The story of early modern women poets is inescapably tied to the phenomenon of Petrarchism. The subgenre of “female Petrarchism” has received comprehensive scholarly treatment, and the creativity that early modern women writers demonstrated in adapting the Petrarchan mode to a female voice is well attested in the literature.11 Vittoria Colonna successfully adapted Petrarch’s language, tropes, and imagery to the context and requirements, both social and cultural, of the female poet. She crafted a (respectable) female voice, selected an (appropriate) male object of desire, and composed chaste expressions of love. Her poetic acclaim, both in life and posthumously, rested in no small part on the skill with which she cultivated her verse in the Petrarchan mode and, through it, her reputation.12

In the amorous verse that she penned in the persona of the devout widow as well as the later spiritual verse that she composed from the stance of the pious penitent, Colonna drew on established literary and religious traditions to produce novel expressions that anticipated future trends. In the 1530s, she was a pioneer of spiritual Petrarchism. Her meditative, mystical, and evangelical religious verse established her as a seminal model of spiritual poetry for contemporary and subsequent writers, both male and female. It is to her religious verse and to the spiritual poetry by women that followed in her wake that the discussion turns in the next section.

3. Women Poets and the Word between the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation

Vittoria Colonna’s spiritual verse is distinctive for its mystical intensity, for its inspiration in monastic models of devotion and contemporary contemplative practices, and for the refined interiority of the poet herself.13 As a source of inspiration for her religious verse, Colonna took the crucified Christ (S1:1) and made clear her intention to seek “other muses” (“altre muse”; S1:2, v. 5), “other mountains” (“altro monte”; S1:1, v. 10 and S1:2, v.5), and “other waters” (“altra acqua”; S1:1, v.10), that is, to replace Apollo and the Muses with the Word, Mount Parnassus and Mount Helicon with Calvary, and the Hippocrene spring with the salvific blood and water that flowed from the pierced side of Christ on the Cross (John 19:34).

Colonna represents or alludes to the crucified Christ and to His wounded flank often in her verse, especially in her overtly contemplative poems.14 She also represents Christ symbolically through images of the sun and of light. In sonnet S1:7, for example, she describes “[her] Sun’s arrival” (“venir del mio Sol,” v. 14) as approximating an “inner dawn” (“interna aurora,” v. 13). She frequently deploys the verb “to see,” most compellingly in the form of the first-person singular, “I see” (“veggio”), to introduce poems of meditation.15 She writes of the inner senses often.16 She also alludes to the Word through arboreal imagery and horticultural references.17 Though Colonna describes Christ’s body on the Cross (S2:36, vv. 103–17) and refers to him as the mystical bridegroom (“il caro Sposo”; S1:8, v.4), it is arguably in the poetry that she constructs around trees and plants that her verse is most erotic.

Arboreal imagery and horticultural and vinicultural metaphors in Colonna’s spiritual poetry tend to be rich in allusions and dense in meaning. She deploys them as a means of evoking specific biblical passages and tenets of reformed faith, such as when she references God as “the great Husbandman of inner glory” (“il grande Agricoltor di gloria interna”; S1:154, v. 11) and speaks of the “well-born plants of the elect” (“le ben nate elette piante”; S1:162, v.3). Sonnet for Michelangelo 20 (S1:12) stands out among her green poems for its sensuousness and its slippery complexity:

        Padre eterno del ciel, se, tua mercede,

    vivo ramo son io ne l’ampia e vera

    vite ch’abbraccia il mondo e chiusa intera

    vuol la nostra virtù seco per fede,

        l’occhio divino tuo languir mi vede

    per l’ombra di mie frondi intorno nera,

    s’a la soave eterna primavera

    il quasi secco umor verde non riede.

        Purgami, sì ch’io rimanendo teco

    mi cibi ogni or de la rugiada santa

    e rinfreschi col pianto la radice.

        Verità sei, dicesti d’esser meco;

    vien dunque lieto, ond’io frutto felice

    faccia in te degno di sì cara pianta.

Eternal heavenly Father, as, by your mercy, / I am a living branch on the broad vine of truth, / which embraces the world and enfolds in its girth / our virtue offered up through faith, // your divine eye will see me languishing / in the dark shadows that surround my leafy tendrils, / if in your sweet eternal spring / my parched sap cannot restore its fresh green color. // Cleanse my soul, so that close by your side / I am nourished eternally by your holy dew / and my roots are refreshed with tears. // You are the truth; you promised to be with me; / come to me joyfully, so that I may grow / sweet fruits in you worthy of this vine.

(Trans. Abigail Brundin)18

Scholarship on this sonnet points out that it is inspired by John 15: 1–8 (Colonna 2005, p. 147 n. 58; Colonna 2020, p. 59), where Jesus describes Himself as “the true vine” and His father as “the husbandman.” In the biblical passage, Jesus explains that His father prunes His branches and purges them to ensure the production of fruit. He tells His listeners that they are cleansed from the word that He has spoken, and He encourages them to abide in Him, and Himself in them, because they are branches and He the vine, and neither can produce fruit without the other.

Colonna clearly evokes the passage. In her sonnet, however, the speaker is not Jesus. She addresses the Father, affirming that she is a branch on the vine of Christ (v. 2), and she asks to be purged (“purgami,” v. 9) and to experience the presence of the promised Word so that she may produce worthy fruit (vv. 12–14). In seeking to remain near Him (v. 9) and to have His dew for nourishment (v. 10), the speaker ascribes attributes of the Son to the Father. In these verses, Colonna clouds, if not collapses, the distinction between God and Christ, drawing attention to their consubstantiality. This is not the only elision in the sonnet.

The speaker describes herself as possessing shaded foliage (“frondi,” v. 6) in need of hydration (v. 8), an image consistent with her self-characterization as a branch, but afterward, she speaks of her roots (v. 11), suggesting her simultaneous existence as a plant (perhaps one at the base of a tree). She seems to combine two related motifs: one from John 15, in which Christ is the “true vine,” and another from Psalm 127:3 (Vulgate), in which the wife is described as a “fruitful vine.” The speaker is both branch and vine, penitent supplicant and enthusiastic future spouse who aspires to be a fertile bride. The imagery is sensuous. The manner and order in which Colonna describes the Word in the sonnet suggests the process of His descent into flesh. First, Christ is the true vine that embraces the world (v. 3). Next, He is the water that nourishes her roots (v. 11). After that, He is the promised one who comes joyfully “to be with [her]” (“esser meco,” v. 12) so that she may produce fruit. An incarnation is at hand, and a sacred conception is suggested too. In this reading, the speaker is Mary—daughter, bride, and mother who dwells in the Word that lives in her.

Colonna’s deeply sensual sonnet is rivaled in eroticism, if not in conceptual sophistication, by Laura Battiferri’s “True Apollo, to Whom Truest Love” (“Verace Apollo, a cui ben vero amore”):

        Verace Apollo, a cui ben vero amore

    impiagò ‘l fianco di pietoso strale;

    ed a prender fra noi forma mortale

    già ti constrinse non mortale ardore:

        ecco colei, lo cui gelato core

    de l’onesto arder tuo non calse, o cale,

    l’errante Dafne, ch’ognor fugge, quale

    notturno augello, il tuo divin splendore.

        Eccol’al fine in duro tronco volta

    e tu pur l’ami e segui e cerchi ornare

    tuo santo crin di sua negletta fronde.

        O grand’amore, o pietà rara e molta,

    chi si fugge seguir, chi t’odia amare:

    amar chi tante frodi in sé nasconde.

True Apollo, you whose flank was pierced by the merciful arrow of truest love and who were constrained by an ardor more than mortal to take on mortal form here on earth: here is she whose icy heart was not touched by your honest burning, and remains untouched by it—that errant Daphne, who still flees your divine splendor like some bird of the night. Here she is now, at last transformed into an unfeeling trunk, and yet you still love her and pursue her and seek to adorn your sacred locks with her heedless leaves. O greatest of loves! O rare and vast mercy, to seek her who flees you, to love her who hates you, to love a creature who harbors such deceptions within.

(Trans. Virginia Cox)

This spiritual sonnet is the third in a series of nine included in the poet’s translation into Italian of the seven penitential psalms.19 In it, Battiferri spiritualizes the Apollo and Daphne myth, transposing it into the Christian language and logic of theo-erotic desire by reversing the characters of lover and beloved. It is a meditation on God’s unrequited love and a dramatization of it.

Apollo is now Christ. We are to imagine that the instrument of piercing is no longer Cupid’s arrow but rather the sword of Longinus and that the wound is an expression of compassionate divine love reflecting God’s redemptive plan for humanity through Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross. As a true Apollo, Battiferri’s Christ is the supreme lover who persists in His noble amorous pursuit despite resistance and rejection. Battiferri’s nymph, by contrast, is wayward. Her Daphne flees, as Ovid’s did, but she runs from holy splendor and a divine embrace, not the threatening grasp of a lustful god. This Daphne is hardened of heart and of body—signs of her (sinful) errancy. With her invitation to Christ-Apollo to behold Daphne in verses five and nine, the speaker reveals herself to be the errant nymph who refuses His touch and runs from His pure ardor, even though she sees Him clearly and marvels at His great love. Battiferri’s version of the Christianized myth is distinguishingly cinematic, especially when compared to similar adaptations of the myth by Petrarch and by Colonna. In a sonnet about unreciprocated love, Battiferri manages to kindle desire.

Among female poets of the spiritual lyric in Counter-Reformation Italy, Francesca Turini Bufalini succeeds most masterfully in narrating divine desire and the matter of its satisfaction. In her “Christ at the Well” (“Cristo al pozzo”) sonnet, Rime 238, the poet imagines a tired, thirsty, and alluring Christ seated at the well, and her speaker addresses Him directly:

        Chi non saria, Gesù, preso e conquiso

    veder la faccia tua così vermiglia,

    mista col bel candor e meraviglia,

    umidi i bei crin d’oro intorno al viso?

        Stanco, anelante, sopra il pozzo assiso,

    con fisse luci e con penose ciglia,

    a l’aura estiva refrigerio piglia

    il monarca immortal del Paradiso,

        le labra asciutte e la serena fronte

    chino riposi su la bianca mano,

    spirando tutto amor, tutto bellezza.

        Deh, corri, anima ingrata, al vivo fonte

    ch’estinguer puote ogni desire insano,

    e resta ebra d’amore e di dolcezza.

Who would not be taken and conquered, Jesus, on seeing your face so crimson, mixed with beautiful whiteness and wonder, and the beautiful golden locks damp around your face? Weary, panting, seated on the well, with fixed eyes and pained brow, and taking refreshment from the summer breeze, immortal Monarch of Heaven, your dry lips and serene brow bent, rest on your white hand, while you breathe only love, only beauty. Run, ungrateful soul, to the living fountain that can extinguish every unhealthy desire and be drunk with love and with sweetness.

(Trans. Virginia Cox, with modifications)20

The sonnet takes its inspiration from the biblical story of the Samaritan at the Well, narrated in John 4: 5–26. While resting near Jacob’s well, Jesus asks a woman from Samaria who has come to fetch water to give him a drink. The woman is surprised by this request because Jews and Samaritans do not typically speak to each other. Jesus responds by explaining to her the living waters of God, clarifying that He is to be adored “in spirit” and “in truth.” A poem by Colonna captures the significance of the passage: it is about “mak[ing] one’s inner desires known to the great Father, to Whom they are always clear” (“far al gran Padre, a cui son sempre chiare, / l’interne voglie”; S2: 29, vv. 7–8). In her sonnet, Turini Bufalini describes Christ in the blazon fashion. She depicts him as an Apollonian figure with pale skin, rosy cheeks, golden hair, and an ivory hand.

Turini Bufalini composed more than one “Christ at the Well” sonnet. In a second one from the same publication, Rime 239, the poet adopts a similar aestheticizing and self-exhortatory approach, but she does not address Christ directly in it. Instead, she allusively portrays different New Testament narratives. She describes the actions of Mary Magdalene, who in the house of Simon the Pharisee, washed Jesus’ feet with her tears, wiped them with her hair, kissed them, and anointed them with ointment (Luke 7: 38)—an act to which Jesus responded by announcing to those present that she would be forgiven many sins because she loved so much (Luke 7: 45–47): “And those naked, tired feet, wounded and weary from the scorched earth, kiss, anoint, wash [them] and hold them close to your bosom!” (“E quelle nude, affatigate piante, / da l’arsiccio terren ferrite e lasse, / bacia, ungi, lava e le ti stringi al petto!”; vv. 9–11).21

In the final tercet of the sonnet, Turini Bufalini describes Jesus/Christ as a celestial lover and encourages invoking His help to gain access to spiritual water (grace)—an allusion to the Samaritan at the Well scene and to the water that issues forth from Christ on the Cross (John 19: 34): “Hope, love, and ask your heavenly lover, and flee from base, infirm things, if it is living water you want from your beloved” (“Spera, ama e chiedi al tuo celeste amante, / e fuggi queste cose inferme e basse / se l’acqua viva vuoi del tuo diletto”; vv. 12–14). For the attentive reader, the most subtly erotic moment in Rime 239 occurs in the second quatrain:

        Godi de sua angelica beltade;

    e quelle labra degli estivi ardori

    rinfresca. E queste son d’amor le strade:

    dare a chi t’ama i suoi dovuti onori.

(vv. 5–8)

Delight in his angelic beauty and refresh those lips from the fierce summer heat. These are the paths to love: give due honors to the one who loves you.

In verses six and seven, Turini Bufalini brilliantly suggests that Jesus-Christ’s lips are paths to love. The sentence that follows her description of the lips begins with the plural demonstrative pronoun “these” (“queste,” v. 5), whose true object, “due honors” (“dovuti onori,” v. 8), does not become clear until the subsequent verse (the very end of line eight in the Italian). The conflation of Jesus and Christ in the sonnet makes clear the doubleness of the narrative, which alludes at once to the New Testament figures of Mary Magdalene and the Samaritan woman and to the lovers of the Canticle of Canticles that allegorically signify the soul and God. In Rime spirituali 41, Turini Bufalini’s third “Christ at the Well” sonnet, the poet indeed invites her soul to imagine and to behold the Lord as her “bridegroom” (“sposo,” v.1) and to notice his “panting mouth” (“bocca anelante,” v. 9).

Allusions to the lovers of the Canticle of Canticles and to their amorous exchanges are resoundingly clear in these three sonnets by Turini Bufalini. In addition to the bridegroom (“sposo”) and to the beloved (“diletto”), one counts the lips (“labra”), the mouth (“bocca”), the kiss (“bacia”), panting (“anelante”), inebriation (“ebra”), the well (“pozzo”), the living water (“acque vive”), and even Christ’s damp hair (“umidi”). All these find parallels in the Canticle of Canticles, from its first line, “Kiss me with the kiss of your mouth” (1:1), to its description of the bride as a “well of living waters” (4:15).22 As one might expect, these are not the only scriptural resonances in Turini Bufalini’s three sonnets. Christ’s panting, a sign of physical and spiritual thirst as well as a breathlessness suggestive of erotic and theo-erotic longing, evokes Psalm 41:2, to which Petrarch also alludes in Rvf 190 (as we saw earlier): “As the hart panteth after the fountains of water; so my soul panteth after thee, O God.” While in Petrarch the passage is evoked by the cervid, in Turini Bufalini the allusion occurs through the far more suggestive action of panting.

Though Petrarchan in many respects, Turini Bufalini’s “Christ at the Well” sonnets share the spirit, tropes, and scriptural allusions of the Italian mystical lauda, including the erotic Christocentric lauds of the Franciscan mystic and writer Bartolomeo Cambi (1558–1617) (Cambi 1609). In the sixteenth century, the tradition of lauda writing not only continued in Italy, but it found new life. The laude of the thirteenth-century Franciscan mystic Jacopone da Todi were re-printed, and those by earlier and contemporary writers appeared in lyric anthologies alongside other spiritual verses (Riga 2018). Like the lauds of these writers, and perhaps also Battiferri’s “Verace Apollo,” Turini Bufalini’s “Christ at the Well” poems seem less about the Word made flesh than about desire itself: the representation and enactment of theo-erotic longing and incitement to it. In these sonnets, her gaze is forward and not backward; on what might be, and not on what was or what must be left behind; on the movement from repentance to theo-erotic desire and not earthly desire to repentance.

4. Conclusion

When the spiritual Petrarchism inaugurated by Vittoria Colonna in the 1530s was submitted to systematic and programmatic revision by Gabriele Fiamma (1533–1585) in the 1570s, the goal was to overhaul the existing poetic idiom by spiritualizing it—by transforming the secular into the sacred and the morally suspect into the ethically sound; for Fiamma, the purpose of holy verse was divine praise, and the Psalms should be its model (Cox 2013, p. 30). To spiritualize Petrarch meant purging his poetry of eroticism and the element of earthly desire. Fiamma was not the only writer to advocate for it. As early as 1543, Girolamo Malipiero (c. 1480–1547), author of Il Petrarca spirituale (Malipiero 1536), expressed the concern that only literate adult males had the maturity and the capacity to not misread Petrarch and the contemporary poets and versifiers inspired by his example (Ussia 1999, p. 17). Though there was a moral dimension to his writing, Malipieri feared that the mid-sixteenth-century reading public was ill-prepared to perceive it rightly.

Petrarch was a sophisticated writer. Like Scripture, his verse could be interpreted on multiple levels and in different ways (as we saw with Rvf 190). Though he was frequently consulted in commented editions, there was no guarantee that he would be read correctly. In short, Petrarch’s verses constituted fertile ground for an efflorescence of incommensurable interpretations that might lead the young and the spiritually or intellectually naïve to lasciviousness and to moral turpitude. Like the Canticle of Canticles, they were best reserved for those who were intellectually and morally advanced, spiritually oriented, and older in age.

In early modern Italy, female poets contributed to elevating the spiritual lyric and Petrarch too. Experimenting with engaging and representing the Word in new and meaningful ways, they drew inspiration from evolving lay practices of affective piety and from direct and indirect reading of scriptural sources to compose verses that reveal both a spiritualizing of the sensuous and a sensualizing of the spiritual. Crafting voices and texts inspired by Petrarch of the Canzoniere, David of the Psalms, and the bride and bridegroom of the Canticle of Canticles, they penned striking descriptions of aestheticized bodies, of eroticized beauty, and of intimate encounter with the Word made flesh expressive of both repentance and theo-erotic desire.

The question naturally arises as to how the female-authored verses examined in this study relate to the broader literary and devotional contexts in which they participated. Many factors contributed to the emergence of eroticized spiritual poetry in sixteenth-century Italy. The trend coincided with the rise to prominence of the madrigal in the second half of the century and with the development of a Baroque religious poetics shaped by the Neo-Ciceronian imperative to move readers and listeners—a conjunction exemplified in the verse of Angelo Grillo (1557–1629) and in his influential Pietosi affetti (1629).23 Like lauda writers before them, Grillo and his male contemporaries adopted a female voice in their religious poetry.24 While the move to sensually spiritualize the love lyric was thus neither exclusive to female writers nor limited to the subgenre of spiritual Petrarchism, religious verse by women in the period nevertheless reveals a strikingly vital and sensuous poetic engagement with the Word and a sustained commitment to literary innovation.