This edited collection presents fresh and original work on Vittoria Colonna, perhaps the outstanding female figure of the Italian Renaissance, a leading Petrarchist poet, and an important figure in the Italian Reform movement. Until recently best known for her close spiritual friendship with Michelangelo, she is increasingly recognized as a powerful and distinctive poetic voice, a cultural and religious icon, and an important literary model for both men and women. This volume comprises compelling new research by established and emerging scholars in the fields of literature, book history, religious history, and art history, including several studies of Colonna's influence during the Counter-Reformation, a period long neglected by Italian cultural historiography. The Colonna who emerges from this new reading is one who challenges traditional constructions of women's place in Italian literature: no mere imitator or follower, but an innovator and founder of schools in her own right.

For centuries readers have struggled to fuse the seemingly scattered pieces of Donne's works into a complete image of the poet and priest. In "John Donne, Body and Soul," Ramie Targoff offers a way to read Donne as a writer who returned again and again to a single great subject, one that connected to his deepest intellectual and emotional concerns.

Reappraising Donne's oeuvre in pursuit of the struggles and commitments that connect his most disparate works, Targoff convincingly shows that Donne believed throughout his life in the mutual necessity of body and soul. In chapters that range from his earliest letters to his final sermon, Targoff reveals that Donne's obsessive imagining of both the natural union and the inevitable division between body and soul is the most continuous and abiding subject of his writing.

"Ramie Targoff achieves the rare feat of taking early modern theology seriously, and of explaining why it matters. Her book transforms how we think about Donne."--Helen Cooper, University of Cambridge

John Donne, one of the most brilliant poets and preachers of the English Renaissance, lived a life full of dramatic changes of fortune, and his writing reflects his wide range of experiences. His collected works vary from passionate love poems to devotional sonnets, from quiet meditations to caustic satires, and from decorous elegies to thundering sermons. For centuries readers have struggled to fuse the seemingly scattered pieces of Donne's life into a complete image of the poet and priest that does not depend on a radical division between the two. In "John Donne, Body and Soul," Ramie Targoff offers a way to read Donne as a writer who returned again and again to a single great subject, one that connected to his deepest intellectual and emotional concerns.
Reappraising Donne's entire oeuvre in pursuit of the struggles and commitments that connect his most disparate works, Targoff convincingly shows that Donne believed throughout his life in the mutual necessity of body and soul. Any experience, whether it be illness, sex, or reading a book, that ignored either its spiritual or physical component was for Donne inevitably incomplete or unsatisfying. In chapters that range from his earliest letters to his final sermon, Targoff reveals that Donne's obsessive imagining of both the natural union and the inevitable division between body and soul is the most continuous and abiding subject of his writing.

"Common Prayer" explores the relationship between prayer and poetry in the century following the Protestant Reformation. Ramie Targoff challenges the conventional and largely misleading distinctions between the ritualized world of Catholicism and the more individualistic focus of Protestantism. Early modern England, she demonstrates, was characterized less by the triumph of religious interiority than by efforts to shape public forms of devotion. This provocatively revisionist argument will have major implications for early modern studies.
Through readings of William Shakespeare's "Hamlet, " Richard Hooker's "Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie," Philip Sidney's "Apology for Poetry" and his translations of the Psalms, John Donne's sermons and poems, and George Herbert's "The Temple, " Targoff uncovers the period's pervasive and often surprising interest in cultivating public and formalized models of worship. At the heart of this study lies an original and daring approach to understanding the origins of devotional poetry; Targoff shows how the projects of composing eloquent verse and improving liturgical worship come to be deeply intertwined. New literary practices, then, became a powerful means of forging common prayer, or controlling private and otherwise unmanageable expressions of faith.

For Dante and Petrarch, posthumous love was a powerful conviction. Like many of their contemporaries, both poets envisioned their encounters with their beloved in heaven-Dante with Beatrice, Petrarch with Laura. But as Ramie Targoff reveals in this elegant study, English love poetry of the Renaissance brought a startling reversal of this tradition: human love became definitively mortal. Exploring the boundaries that Renaissance English poets drew between earthly and heavenly existence, Targoff seeks to understand this shift and its consequences for English poetry. Targoff shows that medieval notions of the somewhat flexible boundaries between love in this world and in the next were hardened by Protestant reformers, who envisioned a total break between the two. Tracing the narrative of this rupture, she focuses on central episodes in poetic history in which poets developed rich and compelling compensations for the lack of posthumous love - from Thomas Wyatt's translations of Petrarch's love sonnets and the Elizabethan sonnet series of Shakespeare and Spencer to the carpe diem poems of the seventeenth century. Targoff's centerpiece is Romeo and Juliet, where she considers how Shakespeare's reworking of the Italian story stripped away any expectation that the doomed teenagers would reunite in heaven. This book ultimately demonstrates that the negation of posthumous love brought forth a new mode of poetics that derived its emotional and aesthetic power from its insistence upon love's mortal limits.