Between Repentance and Desire: Women Poets and the Word in Early Modern Italy

In early modern Italy, lyric poets of spiritual verse experimented with engaging and depicting the divine Word in novel ways. They aestheticized bodies, including that Christ, they imagined eroticized encounters between themselves made flesh. This article examines sensual poetry three Italian women who, 1530 1630, dedicated to crafting reinvigorating poetic word expressing (re)presenting Word. Exploring introspective subjective lyrics Vittoria Colonna (1492–1547), Laura Battiferri (1523–1589), Francesca Turini Bufalini (1553–1641) context literary Renaissance Counter-Reformation, it aims highlight elucidate conflation sacred erotic their verse. so doing, this reveals how these female deployed strategically elevate raised religious new heights by spiritualizing dominant idiom.