Princess of Orange, French Huguenot, widow of William of Orange, diplomat, letter writer Louise de Coligny was a respected noblewoman whose letters document her exercise of informal political influence in France and in the Netherlands during the reigns of Henry IV of France and Maurice of Nassau, stad-holder of the Netherlands. Born in September 1555, Louise de Coligny was the daughter of Gaspard de Coligny and his first wife Charlotte de Laval, both leaders of the Huguenot cause in France. They saw to it that Louise received a solid education from her Protestant humanist tutors, in spite of the fact that her childhood was disrupted by the French Wars of
Religion. Beginning in September 1568, when her family sought refuge in the Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle, Louise lived within the community of Protestant nobles who would form her network for the rest of her life, including Jeanne d’Albret and her children Henry de Navarre (the future Henry IV) and Catherine de Bourbon. She married Charles de Teligny there in May 1571. In Paris for the wedding of Henry de Navarre to Marguerite de Valois in August 1572, Gaspard de Coligny was the original target for what grew into the St. Bartholemew’s Day Massacre of Huguenots, spreading from Paris throughout France. Teligny was also killed. Louise fled to Berne and then to Basel, returning to France only in 1576 when the Edict of Beaulieu allowed for increased religious tolerance. Louise spent the next seven years mainly at Lierville, a property she had inherited from her husband. In the spring of 1583, William (“The Silent”) of Orange, stadtholder of the Netherlands, sought Louise’s hand in marriage. She became his fourth wife and the stepmother of his ten children. Her own son Henry-Frederik was born in January 1584. Louise de Coligny’s second marriage also ended tragically when William of Orange was assassinated by a Spanish sympathizer on 11 July 1584.
In the years immediately after William’s death, Louise de Coligny, now dowager princess of Orange, was entirely occupied with ensuring the survival and the upbringing of William’s youngest children, especially the six daughters of William’s third wife, Charlotte de Bourbon-Montpensier, and her infant son. Having poured all his resources into the fight of the Protestant United Provinces of the Netherlands against the domination of Catholic Spain, William had left only debts. Most of Louise de Coligny’s letters at this time are addressed to relatives or to the various estates general of the Dutch provinces, requesting financial support. She offered to her stepdaughters the same excellent education she had received, ensuring that they learned reading and writing, several languages, music, and dancing. She eventually arranged advantageous marriages for them with Protestant noblemen (Louise-Julienne married the elector of the Palatine, Elizabeth the duke de Bouillon, and Charlotte-Brabantine the duke de la Tremoille). For her own son, she dreamed of a place at the French court of Henry IV. The new stadholder, Maurice de Nassau, had other plans for his half-brother, who became stadholder himself in 1625. Louise’s attempts to establish her son at the French court and her success in arranging marriages for her stepdaughters were also the first steps in her own self-fashioning as a valued negotiator between her stepson, Maurice de Nassau, and her “cousin” and childhood fTiend, Henry IV. Her influence was also felt within the French court. Her sons-in-law, the dukes de Bouillon and de la Tremoille, were two of the most influential of the Huguenot nobles who were alienated fTom Henry IV when he abjured Protestantism and returned to the Catholic faith in order to complete his conquest of France and to enter the pro-Catholic city of Paris. Louise intervened with both of them on behalf of Henry IV, convincing each to support the monarch and the Edict of Nantes, which established religious tolerance in France. After 1594, she divided her time between Nordheim palace in The Hague, her property in Lierville, and the French court. She died in November 1620 at Fontainebleau, where she was the guest of Queen Marie de Medicis. She is buried beside William of Orange in the Niewe Kerk in Delft.
One hundred and ninety-three of the “thousands” of letters Louise de Coligny describes herself as writing have survived, most in the collections of the royal family of the Netherlands (Koninklijk Huisarchief) and in the French National Archives. Louise used the epistolary genre with great skill and grace to develop and maintain her networks and to exercise her influence, skillfully choosing the approach most likely to have an impact on her reader.
Jane Couchman
See also d’Albret, Jeanne; the subheading Letter Writing (under Literary Culture and Women); Power, Politics, and Women; Religious Reform and Women.
Bibliography
Primary Works
Coligny, Louise de. Correspondance de Louise de Coligny, princesse d’Orange. Edited by Paul Marchegay and Leon Marlet. Geneva: Slatkine, 1970. (Originally published in Paris, 1887.)
Couchman, Jane. “Lettres de Louise de Coligny aux membres de sa famille en France et aux Pays-bas.” In Lettres de femmes XVIe-XVIIe sie-cle. Edited by Elizabeth Goldsmith et Colette Winn. Paris: Champion, forthcoming.
Secondary Works
Bainton, Roland H. “Louise de Coligny.” In
Women of the Reformation in France and England. Pages 113-135. Boston: Beacon Press, 1983.
Berriot-Salvadore, Evelyne. “Louise de Coligny.” In Les Femmes dans la societe franyaise de la Renaissance. Pages 134-139. Geneva: Droz, 1990.
Couchman, Jane. “La lecture et le lectorat dans la correspondance de Louise de Coligny.” In Lec-trices d’Ancien Regime. Edited by Isabelle Brouard-Arends, 399-408. Rennes Presses: Universitaires de Rennes, 2003.
Elaborde, Jules. Louise de Coligny, princesse d’Orange. Geneva: Slatkine, 1970. (Originally printed in Paris, 1890.)
Golonna, Vittcria (1490/1492-1547)
Marchesa di Pescara, Italian lyric poet, religious reform leader, prolific letter writer, art and literary patron
Greatly esteemed by her literary peers during her lifetime, Vittoria Colonna became famous as a Petrarchan lyric poet of the highest order and the first woman to turn the genre to female ends with marked success. Her Rime went through numerous sixteenth-century editions and she enjoyed great fame as a result, but her public profile was at all times married to a carefully marketed literary persona embodying all the necessary traits of modesty, chastity, and piety, so that Colonna effectively laid down the first wholly successful formula for literary production by a secular woman in
Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa di Pescara. Lyric poet and religious reform leader. Painting by Girolamo Muziano. Galleria Colonna, Rome, Italy. (Alinari/Art Resource)
Renaissance Italy. Her interest in reform spirituality colored her poetry in her later years, to the extent that her name was associated with a number of individuals who were tried by the Inquisition or left Italy under the cloud of heresy after the first meetings of the Council of Trent.
Colonna was born into the powerful Roman Colonna clan in 1490 or possibly 1492, at Marino close to Rome, the second child of Fabrizio Colonna and Agnese di Montefeltro. She was betrothed at a very young age to Francesco Ferrante D’Avalos, the Marquis of Pescara, in a political maneuver that established an alliance between the Colonna and the Spanish throne of King Ferdinand of Aragon. The marriage was celebrated in 1509 on the island of Ischia off the coast of Naples, and the couple briefly resided together in the Neapolitan countryside before D’Avalos left on the first of the many military campaigns against the French that were to occupy him for the rest of his life. Colonna herself returned to Ischia, to the court presided over by her aunt by marriage, Costanza D’Avalos, where the well-stocked library and lively court environment no doubt helped to encourage her own literary aspirations. A single poetic “Epistle” to her husband, written during his imprisonment by the French in 1512, is all that survives of Colonna’s poetry fTom this early period, but she is cited with enough frequency by contemporary Neapolitan writers to suggest that her literary work was already enjoying significant scribal publication in and around Naples, if not farther afield.
The almost constant absence of D’Avalos from home, as well as his reputation for valor and heroism in battle, appear to have provided Colonna with the necessary contexts of loss and longing required by the Petrarchan format in which she wrote. This was reinforced in 1525, when D’Avalos died from injuries sustained at the Battle of Pavia, and it is no accident that Colonna’s activity and fame as a poet grew exponentially from this date. Widowed, independently wealthy, and childless, she retreated into a convent in Rome as a secular guest and resisted all attempts by her family and the pope to arrange a second marriage. The emphasis in her work on spirituality and the contemplative life was reinforced by the chaste and pious persona she promoted publicly, and, aided no doubt by her wealth and aristocratic status, she was able to formulate a literary voice that commanded considerable respect while preserving the necessary gender decorum.
Colonna’s poetry is stylistically impeccable, drawing on the Petrarchan linguistic and imitative models recommended by Pietro Bembo and others in the period, but also, particularly in the more mature work, rich, sensuous, and innovative in ways that may surprise the uninitiated reader. Although the earlier, so-called “amorous” poems are more traditionally Petrarchan in their emphasis on mourning for the deceased consort, later “spiritual” sonnets embrace instead a far more positive celebration of divine love for Christ, which is flavored significantly by the poet’s personal interest in the ideas and doctrines of reform. In these later poems Colonna’s status as a poetic innovator is clearly established, and indeed her work came to be widely imitated in the later century by writers of both sexes. Bembo himself, grand master of the Petrarchan genre in the sixteenth century, extolled Colonna’s talents as a lyricist, rating her alongside the finest male poets of her age and noting in particular the gravitas of her work that was surprising and admirable in a woman.
A first edition of Colonna’s Rime was published in 1538 and was followed by twelve other editions before the poet’s death in 1547. A particular feature of this phenomenal publication history is Colonna’s personal distance from all editions of her work that appeared during her lifetime, so that she was able to maintain that her writing was in no way related to any desire for personal fame or acclaim (although this claim is perhaps undermined by the large number of manuscript collections of the sonnets that were also in circulation during the period). Particularly notable in this early publication history is the presence of a critical commentary, written by a young scholar from Correggio (Rinaldo Corso) and first published in 1543, the first scholarly exposition of the work of a living poet in this period, let alone a female poet. A further nine editions of the Rime were published before the end of the sixteenth century, when interest in the genre and its practitioners waned. Since then, attention to the poetry has been sporadic, and serious critical consideration has often been undermined by the tendency toward overly biographical readings of these highly stylized and complex verses.
Colonna’s published work is not limited to poetry. She also composed prose works on religious themes, initially as letters, which were later published in collections of prose meditations and in separate editions. These writings demonstrate clearly her interest in religious reform, as well as a concerted attempt to define a role for the secular literary female that draws on the examples of the female “apostles” who appear in the New Testament and in traditional hagiographies, most significantly the examples of Mary Magdalene, Catherine of Alexandria, and the Virgin Mary.
While her literary work has been consistently neglected by the critical establishment, Colonna has remained known for her friendships with famous men of her era. She conducted a poetic and spiritual relationship with Michelangelo Buonarroti that was famous in their own era, predicated on their shared interest in reform spirituality and in lyric production, although it was not in any way a love affair, as the sillier Victorian biographies have asserted. Colonna, widely lauded for the quality of her poetry as well as commanding a far higher social status than Michelangelo and more deeply entrenched than her friend in the reformist debates of the period, assumed the position of authority regarding questions of faith in the poems that they addressed to one another. She also commissioned various artistic works from Michelangelo that clearly arise from the same context of reform-minded exploration. Her private manuscript gift of sonnets for Michelangelo, compiled around 1540, includes many poems that were not published in any printed collection of the period and affords a privileged glimpse of the spiritual and lyric material that most inspired and concerned them both.
A second formative friendship in Colonna’s life was forged with the English Cardinal Reginald Pole, who played a key role in the doctrinal negotiations at the early sessions of the Council of Trent and was famously vilified by Cardinal Carafa, later Pope Paul IV, for his position of compromise with the reformers over the doctrine of sola fide. Pole was Colonna’s religious mentor during the 1530s and 1540s, and she left Rome to reside near him in Viterbo. Under his influence she explored the potential of various doctrines of reform, doctrines that were later defined as heretical at Trent (sola fide, Predestination) but that in this earlier period clearly colored her literary output.
Colonna ended her life after a lengthy illness in Rome, where in February 1547 she died in the Convent of Sant’Anna de’ Funari, shortly after her poetic mentor Bembo. She left behind her a cultural legacy of huge significance in her role at the forefTont of vernacular literary production by secular women in Italy, and her example informed the work of women writers well into the following century. This is not to say that later women writers in Italy limited themselves to the Petrarchan genre in Colonna’s image: Rather, women began to write and publish in a striking range of genres by the end of the sixteenth century. More crucially, Colonna’s example clearly illustrated the close marriage between public persona and literary production in the work of women writers and provided such a successful model of careful negotiation that critics have continued to confuse persona with production ever since. It could certainly be asserted that Colonna’s example helped to spawn the huge increase in women writers appearing in Italy in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when that country far surpassed all others in Europe for the sheer number of women writing and publishing literary works.
Abigail Brundin
See also Art and Women; the subheadings Sonnet Writing and Letter Writing (under Literary Culture and Women); Religious Reform and Women.
Bibliography
Primary Works
Colonna, Vittoria. Carteggio. 2nd ed. Edited by Er-manno Ferrero and Giuseppe Muller with a supplement by Domenico Tordi. Turin: Er-manno Loescher, 1892.
Colonna, Vittoria. Dichiaratione fatta sopra la seconda parte delle Rime della Divina Vittoria Collonna [sic] Marchesana di Pescara. Da Rinaldo Corso. . . . Bologna: Gian battista de Phaelli, 1543.
Colonna, Vittoria. Litere della Divina Vettoria [sic] Colonna Marchesana di Pescara alla Duchessa de Amalfi, sopra la vita contemplativa di santa Cathe-rina, Et sopra della attiva santa Maddalena non pin viste in luce. Venice:Alessandro de Viano, Ad in-stantia di Antonio detto il Cremaschino, 1544.
Colonna, Vittoria. Pianto della Marchesa di Pescara sopra la passione di Christo. Oratione della medes-ima sopra l’Ave Maria. . . etc. Bologna: Manutio, 1557.
Colonna, Vittoria. Rime. Edited by Alan Bullock. Rome: Laterza, 1982.
Colonna, Vittoria. Sonetti in morte di Francesco Fer-rante d’Avalos, marchese di Pescara: edizione del ms. XIII. G.43 della Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli. Edited by Tobia R. Toscano. Milan: Mondadori, 1998.
Colonna, Vittoria. Sonnets for Michelangelo. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Edited and translated by Abigail Brundin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Secondary Works
Besami, O., J. Hauser, and G. Sopranzi, eds. Concordances to Vittoria Colonna e Galeazzo di Tarsia: Le rime. Archivio tematico della lirica italiana. Vol. IV. Hildesheim, Germany, Zurich, and NewYork: Georg Olms Verlag, 1997.
Bianco, Monica.“Le due redazioni del commento di Rinaldo Corso alle Rime di Vittoria Colonna.” Studi di filologia italiana 56 (1998): 271-295.
Brundin, Abigail.“Vittoria Colonna and the Poetry
Of Reform.” Italian Studies 57 (2002): 61-74.
Brundin, Abigail.“Vittoria Colonna and the Virgin Mary.” Modern Language Review 96 (2001): 61-81.
Cox, Virginia.“Women Writers and the Canon in Sixteenth-Century Italy:The Case ofVittoria Colonna.” In Strong Voices, Weak History: Early Women Writers and Canons in England, France, and Italy. Edited by Pamela J. Benson and Victoria Kirkham. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005.
Dionisotti, Carlo.“Appunti sul Bembo e su Vitto-ria Colonna.” In Miscellanea Augusto Campana. Edited by Rino Avesani et al., 257-286. Padua: Antenore, 1981.
Ferino-Pagden, Silvia, ed. Vittoria Colonna: Dich-terin und Muse Michelangelos. Catalogue for the exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, 25 February-25 May 1997.Vienna: Skira, 1997.
Rabitti, Giovanna. “Vittoria Colonna as Role Model for Cinquecento Women Poets.” In
Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society. Edited by Letizia Panizza, 478-497. Oxford: European Humanities Research Centre, 2000.
Therault, Suzanne. Un cenacle humaniste de la Renaissance autour de Vittoria Colonna chatelaine d’Ischia. Paris: Didier; Florence: Sansoni Anti-quariato, 1968.
World History
