Publishing Women: Salons, the Presses, and the Counter-Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy

Renaissance Quarterly, Spring, 2008 by Elizabeth H.D. Mazzocco

Diana Robin. Publishing Women: Salons, the Presses, and the Counter-Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy.

Women in Culture and Society Series. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. xxviii 366 pp. index. append. illus. tbls. chron. bibl. $45. ISBN: 978-0-226-72156-9.

Diana Robin's Publishing Women serves up a smorgasbord of delicacies for the hungry reader. Her narrative style is so flowing and seamless that the reader will find it difficult to put the book down. The women to whom the title refers are the common denominators throughout a series of historical episodes that shaped the Italian print industry in the middle decades of the Cinquecento. Confronted with an abundance of source material, historical personages, and sociohistorical events and movements, Robin divides her subject matter geographically, thereby focusing each chapter on one geographic area in its entirety, all the while interweaving her ubiquitous players as necessary throughout the work. The result is a clear, richly-woven narrative supplemented by lengthy citations in the original Italian (accompanied by English translations), a series of appendices giving full descriptions and citations of original text (much of which has been not reprinted since the Cinquecento), and a scholarly apparatus that invites the reader to study and enjoy the notes as much as the text.

Robin's introduction asserts that, although she examines the lives and works of several "loosely connected groups of elite women and men," her primary focus is the "collective process of publication." Indeed, she traces the publication of women's writings in Italy from its beginning in 1538, when Vittoria Colonna published her Rime under her own name, to the end of the century, when over 200 women were publishing their works. The culmination for women in publishing came in 1559 when, for the first time in Europe, the Giolito Press published the first anthology of women poets entitled Rime diverse d'alcune nobilissime, et virtuosissime donne, which included the work of fifty-three women. Instead of investigating this phenomenon in a vacuum, Robin wisely chooses to trace its development in the context of the events of the period, thus giving the reader "a cultural history ... that considers the significant roles that Italian women played in tandem with men in the literary, political, religious, and social life of the peninsula" (xix).

The saga begins with four women, all with ties to Ischia: Vittoria Colonna (the eldest), Giulia Gonzaga Colonna, Giovanna d'Aragona, and her sister Maria d'Aragona. These women had more than relatives in common, coming from influential, landed families and living their adult lives as virtually single women due to the deaths or extended absences of their husbands. They were all involved, one way or another, in the reform movement in Italy and with its leaders, Juan de Valdes and Bernardino Ochino. That connection was logical enough since reform was a main theme of discussion in the salons, which were gathering places for artists and intellectuals of the day. Many of the more important salons were led by the Colonna-d'Aragona women themselves or were offshoots of one of their salons. The influence of these four women as patrons to the intellectuals in the salon circle was felt throughout the Italian peninsula, having a direct bearing on the eventual publication of poetry anthologies in midcentury. With the rise of the publishing industry, the importance of the women-led salons increased in Italy as they served as focal points for social interaction and intellectual friendships between poets and editors.

Robin takes us from Ischia and Naples to Venice, the capital of the publishing world, for a look at the works that not only came out of the salons but were also literary mirrors of the salons themselves. These published anthologies highlighted the works of both new and familiar authors, introducing authors who were prominent in a particular area to the entire peninsula at the same time that they called attention to the role of the person producing the anthology, the editor at the Giolito Press. Many of the Giolito anthologies combined groupings of poetry clusters--poets who address each other as they did in the salons--and mini-canzoniere, a small poetry selection that relates a scaled-down version of a particular author's life. Robin not only provides a detailed analysis of these works in the main body of her text, but she also dedicates two appendices to physical descriptions of the volumes.

From Venice, Robin moves to Rome and then to Siena, where she underscores the difference between the Sienese salons, run by bourgeois women, and the salons in other cities led by Colonna and her elite counterparts. This contrast is also present in Florence, where, thanks to Benedetto Varchi, Tullia d'Aragona launched her own salon, but, because of her status as a courtesan, could not participate in the more elite academies of the Medici (although she interacted with many of their members). The Giolito Press, fortunately, did not draw class lines, and their anthologies, in particular, served as a melting pot for all classes and genders, as does Publishing Women itself. Everyone from undergraduate to Renaissance scholar will enjoy this journey through mid-Cinquecento Italy.