Laura Battiferra and her Literary Circle: An Anthology by Victoria Kirkham

Abstract

MLR, I03.2,2oo8 559 pages, and is a pleasure to read and handle. Though published in Florence, itwas financed by Ferrarese money and is aworthy tribute by the city to itsmost illustri ous son. ELY CONOR FAHY Laura Battiferra and herLiterary Circle: An Anthology. Ed. and trans. by VICTORIA KIRKHAM. (The Other Voice inEarly Modern Europe) Chicago and London: University ofChicago Press. 2006. xxxii + 493 pp. ?40.50 (pbkC?i6). ISBN 978 0-226-03922-0 (pbk 978-o-226-03923-7). Victoria Kirkham's hugely scholarly edition and translation of selected works by the Florentine poet Laura Battiferra degli Ammannati performs an invaluable service for the academic community. Kirkham has spent fifteenyears in and out of Italian archives researching Battiferra, and itshows. This lengthyvolume presents only a se lection of thepoet's very considerable lyricoutput, aswell as lettersand a translation of themeditative prose work Orison on the Nativity ofOur Lord. Laura Battiferra degli Ammannati, so famously portrayed byBronzino instrangely elongated profile in theportrait of c. I56 Ihanging in thePalazzo Vecchio inFlorence, was an integralmember of the group of artists and writers who energized the city under Duke Cosimo I.An intensely social writer, her first volume of poetry, Il primo librodelle opere toscane [. . .] (Florence: Giunti, I560), is a lyric anthology that ef fectively showcases her many literary friendships through correspondence poems with Florence's most eminent literatiand places her at thecentre of a vibrant network of artists and writers benefiting fromducal patronage. Unusually fora female Petrar chist,Battiferra was happily married, thus her poetry is motivated not by longing for a beloved who is absent or deceased, but by her active engagement with the literary currents of her native city and her own pro-Medicean sentiments. The publication of I settesalmipenitentiali (Florence: Giunti, I564) witnesses Bat tiferra moving her poetry beyond the Petrarchan and epistolary framework of her Primo libro intomore overtly spiritual territory,although Petrarchan language and imagery remain the basis forher translation of thePsalms. The composition of ver nacular translations of sacred textswas a problematic genre in the latterhalf of the sixteenth century,and some attemptswere made at theCouncil ofTrent tocodify and limit thispotentially riskypractice, with an outright ban on vernacular translations in I559 thatwas subsequently lifted in 1564, the year of publication of Battiferra's Sette salmi.A verse translationwith initial prose explanations was a particularly con cerning format for the authorities: verse translations and paraphrases allowed for a freedom of interpretation thatwas not considered desirable. What is more, Battiferra explicitly dedicates herwork, aswell as each individual psalm translation, towomen, thosewho most need tobe protected fromheterodoxy. It isno doubt for this combi nation of reasons that in the early seventeenth century, after the outright ban in the Clementine index of I596 of vernacular texts containing thewords of Scripture in any form, copies ofBattiferra's Sette salmiwere handed in to the church authorities as suspect texts inRome, Perugia, Foligno, and Spoleto (see Gigliola Fragnito, La Bibbia al rogo: la censura ecclesiastica e ivolgarizzamenti della Scrittura, I47I-I605 (Bologna: I1 Mulino, I997), p. 305). The uncertain status ofBattiferra's text reminds us of the period of religious uncertainty throughwhich the poet lived and towhich she responded in her work, ultimately finding a spiritual haven togetherwith her husband, Bartolomeo Ammannati, in the Society of Jesus. Kirkham's most striking contribution to scholarship on Battiferra isher discovery and deep study of a furthermanuscript of poems in theBiblioteca Casanatense in 560 Reviews Rome, intended as a third book of Rime and leftunpublished at the time of the writer's death in I589. This closing compendium of her life'swork contained all of Battiferra's previous published poetry along with numerous poems composed sub sequently and never published. The later poems are, like those of the Primo libro, deeply engaged with wider society, but Cosimo's Florence has been replaced by the circles of Jesuits towhom Battiferra bequeathed her entire estate in her will. The Casanatense manuscript indicates thatBattiferra continued tobe a prolific poet even as her literary motivation turned towards a quieter, more contemplative muse. This edition contains, alongside the standard introduction by the series editors, a volume editor's introduction, fullnotes, and appendices thatwill provide a useful ap paratus...