A sixteenth-century reader and critic of Vittoria Colonna: Rinaldo Corso's commentary on her spiritual rime

Rinaldo Corso's (1525-c.1581) two commentaries on Vittoria Colonna's (1490-1547) verse, the first comprising only her spiritual poetry (1542 and 1543 editions) and the second both love and spiritual poetry (1558), decisively transported her into the Italian literary canon as a renowned and admired poet. This dissertation consists of the first close examination of Corso's first commentary (1542/43) on Colonna's spiritual poetry. Considered not only the first published commentary on the collected works of a female writer, it is also thought to be the first commentary on the collected works of a living writer of either sex. In Chapter 1, I study the life and works of Corso, who was most renowned as a linguist (his most famous grammar treatise was first published in 1549), but also wrote poetry and plays, was employed as a judge, and was eventually appointed bishop. In Chapter 2, I look at the history of sixteenth-century vernacular commentaries on poetry, analyze Corso's method of literary exegesis, and compare the formal aspects of his first commentary with other sixteenth-century commentaries. Since Corso pays special attention to Colonna's lexicon, I demonstrate how his first commentary helped him prepare his grammar treatise. Finally, I survey the increasing number of texts on spiritual topics published in this period to reveal that they likely influenced Corso's decision to initially publish only the second part -- on Colonna's spiritual verse -- of his two-part commentary. In Chapter 3, I compare the two editions of Corso's first commentary and conclude that the earlier edition (1542, which I discovered in 2010) appears to be a kind of rough version that Corso subsequently revised and published again in 1543. Although the 1542 edition lacks a colophon, it was probably not published by Faelli (the publisher of the 1543 edition) but by two different Bolognese publishers who had published Alessandro Piccolomini's lecture on a sonnet by Laudomia Forteguerri in 1541 and using the same type font. Finally, in Chapter 4 I reveal how Corso arranged Colonna's spiritual poetry into a canzoniere that is similar to the manuscript canzoniere of his own poetry he assembled around the same time (early 1540s) and how his commentary/ canzoniere of her verse recounts Colonna's Neoplatonic and evangelical journey from earthly concerns toward a pure and loving union with God.