‘Leading Others on the Road to Salvation’ : Vittoria Colonna and Her Readers

This paper considers the question of Vittoria Colonna’s readership beyond the poet’s intimate circle of friends and associates. It asks who was reading Vittoria Colonna in print in the sixteenth century and how they were reading her. It examines in particular the passage from ‘high’ to ‘low’ in the print circulation of rime spirituali, and the role played by Colonna’s work in defining the reception of the genre, both during its formative period in her lifetime, and in the later sixteenth century, when it had become one of the dominant lyric traditions of the age.