“In My Own Hand”: Costanza Colonna and the Art of the Letter in Sixteenth-Century Italy^*

Abstract

Scholarship on Italian women’s secular writing of the sixteenth century has illuminated the remarkable success female authors enjoyed in print, as well as the complex and ambivalent responses they evoked as a group. This article argues that the more shadowy praxis of ordinary female letter-writing, an obligation for most elite wives and widows, required a baseline level of literacy that enabled more eminent literary women to flourish in print. The essay studies the unpublished letters of the Roman noblewoman Costanza Colonna, the Marchesa of Caravaggio (ca. 1556–1626), to demonstrate her development as a self-taught, competent writer, familiar with the terms of Renaissance debates on the epistolary genre. Colonna exemplifies the hidden world of female literacy that helps explain both the extraordinary flourishing of women’s publishing in sixteenth-century Italy, and the hostility it encountered from some elements of society.

Female Virtue and the Embodiment of Beauty: Vittoria Colonna in Paolo Giovio’sNotable Men and Women*

“… 213 On these developments, see Robin, 2007. On the often underestimated importance of women’s correspondence, see Baernstein, 2013, with a focus on Vittoria’s great-niece Costanza Colonna (ca. 1556–1626). …”

“…Of course marriage frequently required noblewomen to move, as had happened with Colonna herself, but the acceleration of intermarriage among the nobility within the Italian Peninsula had major consequences for local and regional identities. See Baernstein, 2011. Both in person and through correspondence she supported the work of religious reformers, including Juan de Vald es and Bernardino Ochino, and she furthered the cause of literati through her example, guidance, and patronage. 213 Most famously, she became a close friend of Michelangelo's, with whom she discussed in detail the relationship between art and religion just as he was making original contributions to what has been termed "the reform of art."…”