The Space Between: Women, Wisdom, and the Poetics of Spiritual Self-Fashioning in Early Modern Italy

This talk emerges from my current book project on poetics of piety in early modern Italy, a study of the relations between spiritual life and lyric expression in the long sixteenth century that uncovers and elucidates the subtle but diffuse presence of an incarnational poetics and an interstitial conception of identity at the heart of Italian devotional verse. In this talk, I present the salient findings from this research through an examination of selected poems by three women writers: Vittoria Colonna (1490–1547), an influential, reform-minded poet of religious verse who approached the Scriptures as spiritually efficacious devotional texts; Lucrezia Marinella (1571–1653), poet, philosopher and prolific author of devotional works for whom female saints and images of them represented instrumental means of spiritual transformation; and Semidea Poggi (1560s?–1637), canoness, herbalist, and one-time practitioner of magic whose sensually immersive devotional verses uniting the concrete and the conceptional blur the distinction between physical and spiritual, real and imaginary, and make mystery present.

Sarah Rolfe Prodan is Assistant Professor of French and Italian and William H. & Frances Green Faculty Fellow in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. A scholar of early modern Italy, her research centers on the lyric and on relations among cultural forms, philosophy, and religion in the period. Her publications include the award-winning monograph Michelangelo’s Christian Mysticism: Spirituality, Poetry and Art in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and the co-edited volume Friendship and Sociability in Premodern Europe: Contexts, Concepts, and Expressions (Toronto: CRRS, 2014). Her current book project on poetics of piety in early modern Italy considers the ways in which male and female poets of devotional verse engaged the Word in text, image, and imagination in the long sixteenth century.