Vittoria Colonna and Language

Chapter 5 Vittoria Colonna and Language

Helena Sanson

Vittoria Colonna’s life spans a crucial period in the history of the Italian language: by the time she was born, in 1490 or 1492, the printing press was pro- gressively spreading across the peninsula and so was the need for a more homogeneous literary language. In her childhood, the Aldine editions of Petrarch (1501) and Dante (1502) were edited by Pietro Bembo, an important moment of linguistic reflection and close study of Trecento Tuscan that con- tributed to its establishment as the accepted literary vernacular in the course of the century. When Colonna married, in 1509, Bembo was already working on his Prose della volgar lingua and a few years later, in 1516, Fortunio published his Regole, the first printed grammar of the Italian vernacular. The year her husband died, in 1525, the Prose came out in print. In 1538, when her Rime were printed against her will in Parma, Francesco Marcolini published in Venice the second edition of the Prose for an intended readership that was no longer made up only of scholars. The year of her death, 1547, also marks the death of Bembo. Against the background of her life and the rich literary and linguistic produc- tion of her time, this chapter aims to analyze the relationship between Vittoria Colonna—the woman and the poet—and language, taking into account the complex linguistic situation of the peninsula at the time and the lively debates of the Questione della lingua.

The Linguistic Context

During Colonna’s life, Italy was characterized by political and linguistic frag- mentation, a situation that was to remain unchanged until the second half of the nineteenth century and unification in 1861. Various vernaculars, all origi- nally derived from Latin, were in use in everyday life across the peninsula. With the unstoppable spread of the printing press from the 1460s, writers, as well as publishers, felt an increasing need for a standardized, literary language. Lively debates developed at the beginning of the sixteenth century among men of letters and theorists on the nature and definition of this literary language: which one of the many vernaculars in use across the peninsula should become the

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi ��.��63/9789004322332_007 196 Sanson language of culture able to compete with Latin? The controversy, known as the Questione della lingua,1 saw a number of conflicting positions, of which ultimately the one supported by the Venetian humanist Pietro Bembo prevailed. In his dialogue Prose della volgar lingua, Bembo put forth fourteenth-century Tuscan, as used by Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio (particularly Petrarch for poetry and Boccaccio for prose) as the language to be used in literature. This archaizing position therefore supported a language from two centuries earlier, which differed from contemporary Tuscan, due to the normal linguistic changes that occur over time. Bembo’s “vernacular humanism” de facto suc- cessfully applied the theories of imitation of the best Latin classics—Virgil and Cicero—to the vernacular classics, providing a clear and prestigious model for printers and authors alike, backed up by an unsurpassed, rich literary heritage. This position came to be widely accepted, but its success was ultimately the reason for that gap, which was to become a specific feature of the Italian literary and linguistic tradition for a long time, between the spoken language, on the one hand, and the written one, on the other. The former was a local vernacular, learned naturally since childhood. The latter was an artificial language that needed to be studied and learned from books, and for centuries remained beyond the reach of the majority of the (widely illiterate) population. Italian was for a long time the preserve of a restricted circle of scholars and, more broadly, of learned people. Of course, in the sixteenth century Trecento Tuscan was nobody’s mother tongue, not even for Tuscans. It is not surprising then that another current developed, especially in the mid-century, promoted by scholars such as Giovan Battista Gelli, Pierfrancesco Giambullari, and Benedetto Varchi, who claimed that contemporary Florentine, or a more generically defined Tuscan, should be adopted as the literary language. Already earlier in the century an energetic defense had been voiced by Tuscan men of letters (such as Lodovico Martelli, Angelo Firenzuola, and Claudio Tolomei) against proposals by non-Tuscan

1 There is a considerable literature on the Questione. For a starting point in English, see Bruno Migliorini and Thomas Gwynfor Griffith, The Italian Language (London and Boston, 1984). In Italian, see Maurizio Vitale, La questione della lingua (Palermo, 1984) and Claudio Marazzini, “Le teorie,” in Storia della lingua italiana, ed. Luca Serianni and Pietro Trifone, 3 vols. (Turin, 1993–94), vol. 1, 231–329. On the sixteenth century in particular, see Claudio Marazzini, Il secondo Cinquecento e il Seicento (Bologna, 1993) and Paolo Trovato, Il primo Cinquecento (Bologna, 1994), both part of the series “Storia della lingua italiana,” ed. Francesco Bruni. For a more recent contribution, see Caterina Mongiat Farina, Questione di lingua: l’ideologia del dibattito sull’italiano nel Cinquecento (Ravenna, 2014).