Colonna and Petrarch in the Rime of Lucia Colao

This paper focuses on the lyric production of the Friulian writer Lucia Colao (b. 1578), which survives in two manuscripts, in the state libraries of Treviso and Vittorio Veneto. Colao’s Rime represent a rare contribution by a woman to the tradition of spiritual rewritings of Petrarch’s Fragmenta, which began in the 1530s with Girolamo Malipiero’s Petrarca spirituale. Colao recasts in a spiritual form 121 Petrarchan texts (sonnets and canzoni), all deriving from the first part of the RVF and mainly following the sequence of the original. The paper analyzes the complexities of the relationship between hypotext and hypertext in Colao’s Petrarchan reworkings, and the dialectic between conservation, substitution, and resemantization of the lexis and content of the originals. At the same time, it considers the way in which Colao’s texts construct a feminine subject within lyric discourse, in a manner which reflects the lessons of Vittoria Colonna’s earlier creative appropriation of Petrarch in her spiritual lyrics.