Outdoing Colonna: Widowhood Poetry in the Late Cinquecento

Abstract

This chapter examines the influence of Colonna’s widowed poetry on three women writers of the second half of the sixteenth century: Laura Battiferri, Chiara Matraini and Francesca Turina. I demonstrate how Colonna’s famous proemial sonnet, Scrivo sol per sfogar l’interna doglia, and her widowed persona more broadly, is reflected in the works of these later poets. This study also significantly elongates the timeline of Colonna’s influence, proving just how late her rime vedovili were being imitated and explored: deep into the Counter-Reformation, Turina and Matraini were still engaging directly with her work as a way to legitimate their own authorial voices. The chapter’s evidence also troubles longstanding scholarly understandings about how ‘anxiety of influence’ has worked for women writers.