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Reading the Afterlife of Isabella di Morra’s Poetry
Gabriella Scarlatta Eschrich
Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Volume 34, Number 2, Fall 2015, pp.
273-304 (Article)
Published by The University of Tulsa
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/606168
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]Reading the Afterlife of Isabella di Morra’s Poetry
Gabriella Scarlatta Eschrich
University of Michigan, Dearborn
ABSTRACT: This article analyzes the afterlife of the Italian Renaissance poet Isabella
di Morra, whose texts engendered many textual and virtual communities through their
numerous publications from 1552 to 2008. It shows how her author function was medi-
ated by early modern male editors, by the Giolito anthologies, and by various publishers,
literary critics, and modern artists. The several communities that Morra’s poems produced
are here envisioned as an organic rhizome, as theorized by Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari, since the transmittal and reception of her texts and ideas created a multiplicity
of literary and virtual communities, including those crafted more recently by a French
playwright and an Italian singer-songwriter. Morra’s oeuvre continues to dialogue with
writers and readers and to generate a vibrant, prosperous afterlife constructed somewhere
in between the early modern anthologies and the virtual communities of other early modern
women writers.
Perhaps it is time to study discourses not only in terms of their expressive
value or formal transformations, but according to their modes of existence.
The modes of circulation, valorization, attribution, and appropriation of
discourses vary with each culture and are modified within each. The manner
in which they are articulated according to social relationships can be more
readily understood, I believe, in the activity of the author-function and in its
modifications, than in the themes or concepts that discourses set in motion.
Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?”1
In “What is an Author?” Michel Foucault famously claims that the
author’s name “has no legal status, nor is it located in the fiction of the
work; rather, it is located in the break that founds a certain discursive con-
struct and its very particular mode of being” (pp. 147-48; emphasis added).
Indeed, in the case of the Italian Renaissance poet Isabella di Morra
(c. 1520-1545), her function as an author has been mediated by a dense
network of editors, publishers, literary critics, writers, and musicians. It has
been located in many poetic intersections, which gave life to new sorts
of discourse, in their particular mode of being, and in their transmittal,
whether textual, cultural, and/or virtual.
Morra’s thirteen poems had an unusual means of getting to print. In all
probability, they were discovered in the family castle of Favale by investiga-
tors during the inquiry after her murder. They were sent to Naples, where
they were read in literary circles, and then on to Venice, where they were
Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Fall 2015), pp. 273-304. © University of Tulsa, 2015.
All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved.published about seven years after her death.2 It is really then that Morra’s textual existence began. With the subsequent publication of her poetry in various venues and forms over five centuries, she has engendered textual and virtual communities that have produced new and different discourses. In this study, I investigate how she became an author as a material con- struction, how her poetry was transmitted, and how the afterlife of her texts created various textual and virtual communities.3 The communities considered in this essay are those produced through common textual passions and pursuits. The first communities surround- ing Morra’s poetry had at their center sixteenth-century booksellers and poligrafi—that is editors, agents, translators, publishers, and writers for the press. Morra’s poems were initially published in Lodovico Dolce’s antholo- gies, which introduced several poets from Naples, and then Lodovico Domenichi’s anthologies, which brought attention to women writers. Further communities were established by three editors, Antonio Bulifon, Luisa Bergalli, and Angelo De Gubernatis, between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and more recently, by Benedetto Croce and Giuseppe Toffanin in the twentieth century. Finally, her poetry fashioned a theater community with the play Isabella Morra (1973) by the French dramatist André Pieyre de Mandiargues and a music community with the songs of singer-songwriter and modern troubadour Alessio Lega.4 The many and fruitful paths of Morra’s afterlife inform our understanding of early modern authorship and the history of women’s writing, as her journey to the various presses reveals the ways in which a woman poet’s texts could circulate, be known, and continually generate new communities with readers and other writers. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have provided an effective theoretical vocabulary that is useful in describing the communities surrounding Morra’s texts, especially with their concept of rhizome, an agent of connection and interconnectivity: “A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines.”5 Its nature is therefore mobile and regenerative. A rhizome also acts as a model to clarify how Morra’s poetry was adopted by editors and then transmitted to their readers. The transmittal of Morra’s texts indeed integrated her poetry, life, and tragedy according to the editor’s interests and cultural literary canon, thus constructing a second life that was to be passed on from one textual space and social network to the next.6 In this study, I envision the multiplicity of communities in which authors, publishers, artists, readers, and consumers exchange not only Morra’s poems and ideas but also the particularly tragic events of her life as a rhizome. Each community as a social network transfers onto the next because, as Deleuze and Guattari explain, the rhizome crosses its own roots, with its open entrances and its “line of flight” (p. 9). Furthermore, “the rhi- 274 TSWL, 34.2, Fall 2015
zome connects any point to any other point,” in this case one text or tex-
tual community to another (p. 23). A rhizome’s “traits are not necessarily
linked to traits of the same nature,” but it employs “very different regimes
of signs, and even nonsigns” (p. 23). It is the multiplicity and generative
nature of the rhizome that interests me and has explanatory value for the
paths through which Morra has reached audiences since the sixteenth
century. The tendency of Morra’s poems to dialogue with and morph into,
other texts at different times and in different genres and languages con-
tributes to the flourishing character of the social networks discussed in this
essay. The communities of writers and publishers in which Morra’s poetry
circulated developed in rhizomorphic and intertextual relationships. The
concept of the rhizome is particularly compelling in the case of Morra’s
afterlife because of the ways in which her small œuvre, with only thirteen
poems, organically moves and creates connections and new manifestations.
The rhizome generates lines of flight that help to encapsulate Morra’s
legacy in establishing new communities, texts, and artistic productions that
were independent from the poet herself.7 Despite the fact that Morra’s life
was “shattered” and that she did not have a chance to continue to write or
see her work through as other early modern women authors did, her poems
continued to produce a varied and generative afterlife.
Morra’s publishing journey began in 1552 with Dolce’s anthology Rime di
diversi illustri signori napoletani, e d’altri nobiliss. intelletti; nuovamente raccolte,
e non più stampate [Poems by various illustrious Neapolitan individuals, and
of other most noble intellects; newly collected, and no longer published]
at the Giolito press in Venice.8 The Neapolitan bookseller Marc’Antonio
Passero had obtained some of her poems after their discovery in the Morra
castle and then sent them to Dolce in Venice.9 The volume in 1552, which
was published three times with corrections, additions, and new authors,
contains eight of her sonnets and one canzone, an Italian lyrical form.10
Then, in 1556, Dolce published Rime di diversi signori napoletani. e d’altri.
nuovamente raccolte et impresse [Poems by various Neapolitan individuals,
and by other writers, newly collected and published] in which he intro-
duced two new sonnets and two new canzoni (see appendix 1).11 Morra’s
authorship fully materialized in the textual space of the 1552 and 1556
anthologies, and her literary history began in a collection through which
her poems were, to borrow Deleuze’s and Guattari’s term, “deterritorialized”
with other authors’ texts, gesturing to a geocultural textual community (p.
11).
In examining Morra’s place within Italian literary and publishing history,
it is helpful to consider Diana Robin’s observation that “neither women
275nor the Neapolitan poets were represented in the anthologies in significant
numbers until 1551. Both groups had remained outside the cultural main-
stream in northern Italy and certainly outside Venetian print culture until
roughly that year.”12 The fact that in all three editions of the 1552 Dolce
volume, Morra is the only female poet anthologized arguably draws atten-
tion to the importance of her texts rather than her gender. Not until the
1556 volume is Morra published together with other women writers, such
as Chiara Matraini, Lucretia di Raimondo, Laura Terracina, and Caterina
Pellegrina.13 Dolce’s groundbreaking initiative in the 1552 anthology to
include her poems with, as he notes in his dedicatory letter, “molti Illustri
Signori et elevati spiriti di cotesta nobilissima citta” (the many Illustrious
Individuals and elevated spirits of this very noble city) is a crucial moment
in the history of women’s authorship, as Morra’s worth and provenance
alone are taken into consideration.14 As Leah Chang has demonstrated, in
many cases “the female author is a textual and material construct, rather
than a purely historical and biographical entity,” as evident in Dolce’s three
volumes (p. 22); Morra is constructed as one of Naples’s “elevated spirits,”
and her gender is overshadowed by the more important geocultural net-
work of her city. As we shall later see, her historical and biographical self
at times overpowered her textual self due to the tragic nature of her life and
death. Indeed, her life story and reception history are very much a gendered
narrative of brotherly jealousy, family honor, violence, and isolation.
A host of questions remain as to how exactly Passero secured Morra’s
poetry and whether he transcribed it or sent the original manuscripts to
Dolce.15 Additionally, the intellectual and cultural hegemony of Naples in
southern Italy in the early modern period—as a powerful urban center with
a university, a viceroy court, and a population of about 250,000 people—
undoubtedly contributed to the circulation and transmission of Morra’s
thirteen poems.16 Her name was probably already known in influential
Neapolitan literary circles, thanks to her father, Giovanni Michele Morra,
a humanist and literato, and to her friendship with the Spanish poet Diego
Sandoval de Castro, a member of the Accademia della Crusca and a friend
of the humanist Benedetto Varchi. Morra and Castro exchanged letters and
sonnets, a dangerous transaction that provoked her brothers’ suspicion and
sense of dishonor. This brief intellectual, mixed-gender exchange caused
her death. Her brothers accused Castro and their sister of a romantic liai-
son, then murdered her, her tutor (who was acting as go-between), and
three months later, Castro.17 A case certainly can be made that Morra was
a victim of her own writings, as “dishonor” stemmed from the mere act of
composing poems.18 I see the giving and receiving of written words as the
first rhizome. The fact that her writings crossed the domestic threshold in
the hands of her tutor and Castro gave her a second life and a place in vari-
ous virtual communities, even as it caused her death.
276 TSWL, 34.2, Fall 2015Dolce’s first edition of his Rime di diversi illustri signori napoletani, e d’altri
nobiliss. intelletti not only meant the beginning of Morra’s literary life but
also of her virtual community, legitimized in literary terms by the power-
ful canonizing role of anthologies. The anthology had the function of a
sourcebook, a keepsake of the best poems to be not only read but also
memorized and imitated. As a genre, the anthology represented a commu-
nity of readers who shared a passion for poetry and a variety of authors. As
her first form of materialization, the anthology or raccolta, with its regional
delineation, set Morra apart from other early modern women writers who
had previously published their work in single-authored volumes, such as
Vittoria Colonna, whose first volume was published in 1538.19 This differ-
ence suggests how crucial it is to frame Morra’s work in terms of afterlife,
not least because her poetry was all but unknown while she was still alive.
A second fundamental moment in her work’s afterlife was 1559, when
Domenichi assembled all thirteen of her compositions and included them
in his pioneering anthology Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime, et virtuosis-
sime donne [Various poems by some very noble and virtuous women].20 It is
important to note that because of her sudden death, Morra herself played
no role in determining the sequence in which her poems would be read.21
Domenichi took an active role in fashioning a particular vision of Morra by
organizing her writings according to a Petrarchan canzoniere or Rime Sparse
model, constructing a miniature canzoniere with her poems in his anthol-
ogy.22 As Robin points out, there are fifteen other mini-canzonieri present
in Domenichi’s anthology, each containing anywhere between six and
forty-five poems.23 Morra’s life, aspirations, and pangs are hence compiled
from the first sonnet, in which she cries of her “verde etate” (young and
tender age)—
I fieri assalti di crudel Fortuna
scrivo piangendo, e la mia verde etate;
me che ’n sí vili ed orride contrate
spendo il mio tempo senza loda alcuna.24
(I write weeping about Fortune’s cruel and fierce assaults
and mourn my young and tender age;
I, who live in such vile and horrid land
and spend my time without any praise)
—to the last canzone, in which she longs for death and wishes to be in
heaven by the Virgin Mary’s side:
Quanto discovre e scalda il chiaro sole,
canzon, è nulla ad un guardo di lei,
ch’è Reina del Ciel, Dea degli dei.25
(When the clear sun rises and heats,
my song, nothing matters in front of her gaze,
She, who is the Queen of Heaven, and Goddess of all gods.)
277Domenichi employed Morra’s tragic life as an organizing principle because it allowed him to fashion the author and her poetry for commercial con- sumption, a motivation for poligrafi across Italy. Virginia Cox notes that in this period, the demand for female-authored works had outstripped supply, and Domenichi met that demand by portraying Morra as an exemplum of feminine martyrdom, perfectly in sync with his project of collecting virtu- ous ladies.26 Marie-Françoise Piéjus remarks, L’œuvre poétique d’Isabella di Morra, réordonnancée par Domenichi, devient porteuse d’une leçon morale qui vise à l’édification des lecteurs, et particu- lièrement des lectrices, susceptibles de vivre des épreuves comparables. Sa mort même apparaît acceptée et tranfigurée par la perspective finale de vie éternelle.27 (Isabella di Morra’s poetic work, reordered by Domenichi, embodies a moral lesson that aims at the readers’ edification, in particular female readers, who are likely experiencing similar life events. Her very death seems to be accepted and transfigured by the final perspective of eternal life.) By fashioning a spiritual itinerary in which suffering is at center stage, Domenichi superimposed Morra’s textual existence onto her tragic bio- graphical existence. In so doing he undoubtedly succeeded in creating a “very noble and virtuous woman writer,” whose verses had a specific reli- gious focus and trajectory, thus completely overshadowing the suspicion that prompted her brothers to murder her. Morra was indeed canonized in Domenichi’s anthology and presented to early modern readers as a young virgin whose existence was particularly harsh and heartbreaking.28 In this fashion, Morra’s miniature canzoniere belongs to a community of women of letters from all over the Italian peninsula, breaking geographi- cal boundaries and connecting with a new rhizome. Domenichi allowed Morra’s texts not only to dialogue with other women’s writings but also to be compared and contrasted with them, which significantly strength- ened her literary and gender legacy. These comparisons demonstrate the unusualness of Morra’s afterlife: in Dolce’s anthology, she is the only female writer, and in Domenichi’s, the entirety of her oeuvre is purposely organized according to female exemplarity of the time.29 Domenichi’s presentation in particular establishes a connection with other male-authored editions of Morra’s poetry, as we shall soon see, thereby connecting to an additional rhizome of early women’s writings published by male editors. The textual constructions of the poligrafi shape an author’s afterlife. As Chang argues, “female authorship emerges through a complex set of interactions between writers and book producers such as printers, pub- lishers, and editors, and at the intersection of the text and its material imprint” (p. 19).30 The stages of Morra’s afterlife—first in a community of Neapolitan writers and second in a community of women writers—set her 278 TSWL, 34.2, Fall 2015
publication history apart from those of other Italian Renaissance women
poets and make the trope of the rhizome so useful in understanding her
print and reception history. The fact that within the same decade (1552-
1559) her author function was situated in the Naples region and then
amidst a community of virtuous and noble women in which she is por-
trayed as a young virgin and martyr sets her apart from other Renaissance
women authors such as Veronica Gàmbara (1485-1550), Vittoria Colonna
(1492-1547), Tullia d’Aragona (1510-1556), and Gaspara Stampa (1523-
1554), whose publication histories started while they were still alive and
who experienced some form of literary recognition and community. Robin
has noted that “the woman-led salon was the primary vehicle by which
elite women first entered the commercial print world of sixteenth-century
Italy.”31 Morra stands out from this tradition, having never participated in
salons. Her poetry emerges within a kind of virtual salon, however, having
reached print within the context of a constructed community, defined first
by geography and then by gender.
One of the first Neapolitan poets ever to be published by a prestigious
commercial press, Morra numbers among the six authors of the 1550s
whose work was most frequently printed in the sixteenth century.32 Both
Dolce and Domenichi crafted regional and gendered communities, produc-
ing her as a textual and material construct rather than a purely biographical
entity.33 Her public existence materialized and was reproduced through the
printed text, as if her short and lonely life had never existed; her written
words were left to fill the void created by her death. This disconnect also
sets Morra apart as an authorial construction; while both communities
defined her as an author, anthologized with fellow writers of her period,
Morra had never had any contact with readers, writers, or book producers.
She had no say in how her author function would come to be. However,
she was fully conscious of her writing activity and did reflect on it, as for
example in the following verses:
Scrissi con stile amaro, aspro e dolente
un tempo, come sai, contra Fortuna,
sí che null’altra mai sotto la luna
di lei si dolse con voler piú ardente.34
(I once wrote in bitter, harsh, and painful style
as you know, against Fortune,
so that no one else under the moon
ever complained about her with more fervent will.)
If this verse shows that the poet was unaware of the future materialization
and reception of her discourse, in a previously cited verse, she laments
her obscurity: “spendo il mio tempo senza loda alcuna.” Domenichi’s
publishing of her poetry effectively included her in a virtual community
279of women writers who shared common literary passions and pursuits.35 Deanna Shemek’s definition of this community is particularly telling. She notes that this little enclosed society . . . is arguably more audible and mobile on paper than it is in real life; for we find in Domenichi’s anthology not a real society but a parasociety, a virtual community of women, many of whom may never have met but who appear, as an effect of the book’s framing, to be in some sort of dialogue.36 While Morra’s living voice was confined and silenced by the thick walls of her family castle, her verses became audible and mobile within a textual construction of female literary community. The next important moment in Morra’s textual transmission took place almost one hundred and fifty years later, back in Naples, where the French printer Antonio Bulifon published her thirteen poems in his 1693 Rime delle Signore Lucrezia Marinella, Veronica Gàmbara, ed Isabella della Morra di nuovo date in luce da Antonio Bulifon con giunta di quelle fin’ora raccolte della Signora Maria Selvaggia Borghini [Rhymes by ladies Lucrezia Marinella, Veronica Gàmbara, and Isabella della Morra brought to light again by Antonio Bulifon with some additional poems thus far collected by Lady Maria Selvaggia Borghini].37 Morra’s poetry was printed side by side with that of two well-known authors in an atypical sequence. Bulifon placed her three canzoni first and then her ten sonnets, following purely a metric criterion by sequencing the longer form first, followed by the short form. Moreover, Bulifon slightly changed her canzone “Quel che gli giorni a dietro” in order to temper Morra’s erotic images and references to classical divinities; for example, “accolta fu tra i Dei” (I was welcomed among the Gods) becomes “accolta fu tra i Bei” (I was welcomed among the Beautiful).38 As Ann Rosalind Jones notes in her study of textual revi- sions by male editors, these revisions often reveal “the historically gendered assumptions on which the canonization of early modern European women poets has proceeded” (p. 288). Morra’s canonization in the seventeenth century was consequently fashioned in a community of three women writ- ers whose poetry had been previously anthologized and widely circulated. Her author function existed through a community redefined by Bulifon and regulated by the period’s culture.39 The new rhizome Bulifon generated with the intimate community of three female poets developed further two years later when he published Morra once again in a new volume titled Rime di cinquanta illustri poetesse di nuovo date in luce da Antonio Bulifon (1695; Rhymes by fifty illustrious 280 TSWL, 34.2, Fall 2015
women poets brought once again to light by Antonio Bulifon).40 The title
is in itself revealing because it underscores its editor’s role in “di nuovo”
(once again) bringing to light fifty illustrious women poets. However, in
this collection, the French editor used Domenichi’s sequence of Morra’s
poems and reversed his previous edits. This anthology is an accurate repro-
duction of the 1559 anthology, as if Bulifon wanted to closely reproduce an
existing, successful model for anthologizing not only Morra but also many
other women writers. This volume was widely disseminated, and accord-
ing to Robin, many authors from the 1559 anthology never would have
been republished if it were not for this edition.41 I see this as an important
moment in women’s literary history, as it essentially presented once again
Domenichi’s virtual community to readers and writers alike. For Morra in
particular, Bulifon’s two books allowed the rhizome to strengthen its lines
of expansion as well as to establish a virtual dialogue between the first com-
munity of women authors in 1559 and the second in 1695. Furthermore,
his anthologies continued a tradition of women’s writing and publishing,
carried on to the next century at a subsequent important moment when
Morra’s community reemerged and her poetry was again circulated.
In 1726, the Venetian poet, translator, playwright, and literary critic
Luisa Bergalli (1703-1779) compiled her ambitious Componimenti poetici
delle più illustri rimatrici d’ogni secolo, raccolti da Luisa Bergalli [Poetic com-
positions by the most illustrious women poets from all centuries, collected
by Luisa Bergalli], the first Italian anthology of women poets created by a
woman.42 This erudite and impressive enterprise is composed of two vol-
umes. In the first, Bergalli included 112 women poets from about 1500 to
1575; in the second, she assembled the poetry of 136 women from 1575
to 1726, of which fifty-six were still alive.43 Bergalli’s anthology of women
poets (rimatrici) is significant because, as Stuart Curran notes, it testifies
to “her sense of a progressive historical development in the exfoliation of
a woman’s literary culture.”44 It comprises an important contribution to
women’s literary history, for it provides a comprehensive catalog of women
poets from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century and a testament to a
tradition of female poetic accomplishments.45 In her effort to collect, cata-
log, preserve, and transmit these texts, Bergalli maintains Morra’s voice as
vibrant and alive, creating a bridge between Dolce, Domenichi, Bulifon,
and the eighteenth century. Furthermore, according to Pamela Stewart,
this volume is Bergalli’s meaningful and affirmative response to a debate
that preoccupied the Venetian Accademia dei Ricoverati as to whether
women should be allowed to study the sciences and noble arts.46
Bergalli places six of Morra’s poems within the larger Cinquecento
virtual community in a chronological order according to the writers’ dates
of death.47 In her brief introduction to Morra, Bergalli states that her rime
are to be printed together with those of Veronica Gàmbara and Lucrezia
281Marinella, a combination that reverberates with Bulifon’s 1693 volume
Rime delle Signore Lucrezia Marinella, Veronica Gàmbara, ed Isabella della
Morra.48 Bergalli’s anthology is in a meaningful intertextual dialogue with
both Domenichi’s and Bulifon’s collections although her community of
women authors has more than doubled. The deterritorialization of Morra’s
poetry allows Bergalli’s work to conjoin already existing rhizomes from the
early modern period with new ones in the eighteenth century. Venice as
a printing capital became once again Morra’s material locus, continuing a
line of flight from Naples to Venice, then to Lucca, back to Naples in the
seventeenth century, and then again to Venice in the eighteenth.
Morra’s poetry emerged again in 1883, when the literary critic Angelo
de Gubernatis included her poems in his collection Antologia delle poetesse
del secolo decimosesto (An anthology of women poets from the sixteenth
century).49 Rinaldina Russell sees this publication as a “first wave of
feminism in the second half of the nineteenth century,” and although very
little scholarly attention has been devoted to this collection, Gubernatis’s
volume is indeed an important moment in Renaissance women poets’
publication history, as it made their work accessible to new audiences.50
However, Morra alone became the object of Gubernatis’s critical scrutiny
in his subsequent work “Il Romanzo d’una poetessa” (A female poet’s
novel).51 This essay constitutes an interesting episode in Morra’s textual
transmission because Gubernatis composed it by weaving Morra’s poetry
into a romantic work of his own, arranging the sonnets and canzoni accord-
ing to his sentimental imagination. The story told by Gubernatis is not
Morra’s narrative; rather, it is a male literary critic’s narrow reading of her
texts and biographical record. His appropriation and valorization construct
Morra’s author function within a limited, highly controlled assertion. Her
voice is ventriloquized to bend and twist according to her editor’s own
rewriting, which is vastly representative of the nineteenth-century cultural
and literary scenes. Morra’s textual identity is manipulated, crafted in order,
as Gubernatis proclaims, to “ad eccitare in noi le facoltà immaginative”
(p. 424; excite our imaginative faculties). Gubernatis’s article starts by
comparing Morra’s life to that of Lisabetta of Messina, the heroine of the
fifth story told on day four in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron. He then
guides us from one poem to the next, introducing each one with sentences
such as “Passano i giorni, i mesi, gli anni, senza che giunga più alcuna
speranza di conforto ed aiuto” (p. 431; Days, months, years go by without
any hope for comfort nor help). As if he could physically see and feel her,
he introduces her canzone “Quel che gli giorni a dietro,” stating: “Essa esce
dunque di casa ed erra per le foreste, contenta almeno di rimanere tutta
sola co’ suoi soavi pensieri, e cercando Dio nella natura” (p. 432; She then
leaves the house and runs through the forest, happy to finally be alone
with her grave thoughts, and looking for God in nature). Although almost
282 TSWL, 34.2, Fall 2015entirely imagined by Gubernatis, this rendition of Morra’s life and work
were bound to ignite the reader’s imagination. Essentially, while seeking
recognition for Morra’s poetic skills, Gubernatis renarrates her sonnets and
canzoni, transforming them into a short novella and freely changing from
one genre to another. It is clear that Gubernatis admires Morra; however,
it is with sheer romanticism that he prefaces each sonnet and canzone. His
account turns Morra into a symbol of hope for all the victims of domestic
violence in Italy, and his comments encompass the poetic, the literary, the
cultural, and the social (p. 443). The woman poet becomes, it appears, a
nineteenth-century exemplum of domestic violence avant la lettre.
Gubernatis continues his narrative with strong subjective judgments
when introducing the sonnet “Ecco ch’una altra volta, o valle inferna”:
“la quale si vede intieramente perduta, e sente imminente la sua fine;
allora scrive gli ultimi due disperati sonetti, vero canto di cigno, che non
si possono leggere senza un fremito doloroso” (p. 440; she finds herself
completely lost, and feels that her end is near. Thus, she writes her last two
tragic sonnets, true swan song, which one cannot read without a painful
quiver). Gubernatis’s readings of Morra’s poems have been determined by
her isolated life and the atrocity of her death. Her tragedy is also reflected
in the ordering of her poems and in the romanticized biography fashioned
in the introduction to her texts. Jones notes that some editors of early
women writers developed portraits that “corresponded to their own defini-
tion of the canonizable poetessa as an idealized, isolated, and penitential
figure, a fantasy female,” which rings especially true in Gubernatis’s por-
trait of Morra and in Domenichi’s implementation of his personal agenda
(p. 287). One might wonder what the rhizomorphic effects of Gubernatis’s
ventriloquizing her poetry would be within the appropriative interweav-
ing of his own dramatic commentary. Even this particular rhizome is a
testimony to her uniquely prolific afterlife because similar social concerns
will later appear in the lyrics of the Italian singer Alessio Lega, who also
weaves Morra’s poetry into his own work. Nevertheless, Gubernatis’s inter-
est in and publications on Renaissance women poets highlight women’s
important role in the cultural and literary activities of the early modern
period, and his inclusion of Morra’s texts contributed to her recognition,
thus extending her virtual community into the nineteenth century.
In 1929, Benedetto Croce published an influential monograph, Isabella
di Morra e Diego Sandoval de Castro (Isabella di Morra and Diego Sandoval
de Castro), thoroughly reconstructing Morra’s life and providing a modern
edition of her poetry. Croce based his study on meticulous archival work
and on the accounts of Marc’ Antonio di Morra, the son of Isabella’s
283younger brother Camillo di Morra (born in 1528), who wrote the family chronicles Familiae nobilissimae de Morra historia (History of the most noble Morra family) in 1629. This volume constitutes the basis for not only Croce’s study but also other scholars’ attempts at retracing Morra’s family events, including the actions that led her father to seek exile in France and her brothers to commit three murders. In reproducing Morra’s thir- teen poems, Croce followed Domenichi’s sequence because as he explains: “quello [l’ordine] che si trova nelle edizioni posteriori li dispone con certa progressione storica . . . , che, come si è detto, è congetturale, e, in fondo, arbitraria” (All other subsequent editions follow a historic progression . . . which, as mentioned, is conjectural, and indeed, arbitrary).52 Croce’s state- ment reinforces my argument that the events of Morra’s life have been used as an organizing principle, following a sometimes fictional and subjective progression.53 Croce reprinted Morra’s poems together with twelve sonnets by Castro as if to build an exegi monumentum to both poets and to celebrate their relationship. He thus carved a symbolic joint textual space in literary history. The very poems that they supposedly exchanged in secret and that caused both their deaths are bound together, allowing them to dialogue freely and adding another rhizome to Morra’s afterlife. To this day, Croce’s biographical monograph remains the document most referred to by scholars not only because of his exhaustive research and his modern edition of both Morra’s and Castro’s poems but also because of Croce’s leading reputation in Italy’s literary and cultural scene. His work constitutes an important moment in Morra’s afterlife that vastly extended its reach and impact, even beyond geographical and linguistic borders.54 Bulifon’s community of Marinella’s, Gàmbara’s, and Morra’s texts mate- rialized again, when Giuseppe Toffanin published his Le più belle pagine di Gaspara Stampa, Vittoria Colonna, Veronica Gàmbara, Isabella Morra scelte da Giuseppe Toffanin (1935; Gaspara Stampa’s, Vittoria Colonna’s, Veronica Gàmbara’s and Isabella Morra’s most beautiful pages chosen by Giuseppe Toffanin).55 Collecting the four women writers’ most beautiful pages undoubtedly provides a meaningful connection between the seven- teenth- and twentieth-century communities of readers, a connection that contributes to the history of women’s authorship because of the inclusion of Stampa and Colonna, two of the most accomplished and appreciated writers of the Italian Renaissance. The act of reproducing, in a beautiful volume, four female poets who had greatly contributed to the sixteenth- century Italian literary canon constitutes a vibrant rhizome generating a new community, as Morra’s poems here dialogue closely with those by Colonna and Stampa.56 In this community, however, Toffanin frequently underscores his own contribution to the canon as a curator, thus boosting his personal agenda. 284 TSWL, 34.2, Fall 2015
In his introduction, the repetition of countless varieties of the word
“choice,” such as “prescelte,” “scelta,” “scelte,” “scegliere,” and “il miglior
criterio per scegliere,” illustrates how Toffanin valued his volume’s worth
(pp. xiii-xv). With this publication, according to its editor, four women
poets are connected in a community based on the principle of including
the most beautiful female poetry the Cinquecento had to offer. When it
comes to Morra’s specific poems, Toffanin seemed overly preoccupied by
the tragedy of her short life and by his own selection process rather than
by her lyrical skill. He states, “quelli certamente abbiam scelto dai quali
le vicende della sua breve e triste storia meglio risultassero lumeggiate e
in certo senso riassunte” (p. 194; We chose those poems from which the
events of her short and sad story would better come to light and, in a way,
be summarized). Toffanin minimizes Morra’s authorial persona and func-
tion while featuring her life’s events. His introduction prefaces her poems
in an unusual way, crafting an unassuming justification for the inclusion of
Morra in his volume:
Fin qua era uso riservar l’onor della scelta a queste tre sole . . . se ci s’attiene,
invece, a criteri meno critici e più umani, par necessario aggiungere a queste
tre prime, una quarta: Isabella di Morra che, dalle capitali, ci porta fra le
solitudini di Basilicata il cui feudal costume balena ancora barbarie. (p. xiii)57
(up to now the usual choice would have been to only select these three writ-
ers . . . on the other hand, if one considers criteria that are more humanistic
than literary, we must also add a fourth one: Isabella di Morra, who takes us
from the northern Italian capitals to the solitude of Basilicata, whose feudal
customs are still very barbarous.)
Furthermore, Toffanin invents titles for Morra’s six poems as if to guide the
reader through her poetry by condensing each poem’s meaning to a single
line, as for example “Invocazione al padre esule” (p. 195; Invocation to an
exiled father) for her sonnet “D’un alto monte onde si scorge il mare” and
“La canzone della rassegnazione” (p. 201; The resignation song) for her
canzone “Signor, che insino a qui, tua gran mercede.”58 He thus followed
Gubernatis’s lead in an attempt to redefine authorship; their communi-
ties, although still valuable in spreading Morra’s poetry, closely control
her voice and restrict her author function. Likewise, Toffanin seems to be
unable to refrain from highlighting Morra’s tragic existence at the grave
expense of her poems when he claims: “Lo so: i versi della Morra, che qual-
che volta sono belli, restano come sopraffatti dalla, aihmè! troppo bella tra-
gedia ond’ella fu vittima” (p. xiii; I know Morra’s verses, which sometimes
are beautiful, remain overwhelmed by, alas! her too beautiful tragedy of
which she was a victim). Again, the devastating solitude of her life and the
atrocity of her death guided Toffanin in narrating the entirety of her story.
285Over the centuries, most of Morra’s editors framed her writings around
her unfortunate life and death, attending to her poems only as a second
thought and clearly at the expense of the poems’ true themes, concepts,
and traits. The tragedy of her untimely death has often engrossed her crit-
ics and her readers more than her poetry itself. Morra’s authorial figure
and function have changed radically from her first appearance in Dolce’s
anthology of 1552 to Toffanin’s volume of 1935, revealing her editors’
personal agendas and engendering communities steeped in contempora-
neous cultural and material assumptions. A sequence of book producers
have handled, manipulated, sequenced, and made crucial choices about
her poems and created a second authorial life, which, as a rhizome, has the
capacity for “multiple entryways” with proliferating access and possibilities
(Deleuze and Guattari, p. 14).
More recently, Morra’s verses have been transformed into a play, a song,
and an Internet hit on YouTube. These adaptations have created theater
and music communities, refining her poems’ ability to establish connec-
tions with new artists and cultural manifestations. In 1973, Morra became
both the object and speaking subject of the homonymous play Isabella
Morra by André Pieyre de Mandiargues, who discovered the Italian poet
through Croce’s monograph.59 Mandiargues creates a dubbing of Morra’s
original voice with the voice of her character, Isabella, skillfully inserting
her sonnets and fragments of her canzoni.60 For example, in the last two
pages, Isabella recites three of Morra’s most tragic sonnets in an intense
crescendo of genre melding between play and poetry.61 Thus the audience
is in the presence of not only the actress in character but also of the poet
as speaker of her own poems. The effect produced by the dubbing is also
skillfully achieved by the translation of her poetry from Italian to French.
With this translation, Mandiargues carved yet another virtual community
shaped by his desire to spread Morra’s voice, crossing borders of geography,
language, and genre. Isabella recites some of Castro’s poems, translated into
French as well, so that the rhizome shared by Morra’s and Castro’s verses
may continue from Croce’s work well into the twenty-first century when-
ever the drama is performed.62
Because of the play’s ability to move from Morra the author and her texts
to Isabella the actress and her voice, Sophie Basch has labeled it “la plus
étonnante illustration de métatextualité qui nous soit donnée à lire, à voir
et à entendre” (The most astonishing meta-textual example that we can
read, see, and hear).63 For critics such as Ornella Volta the play embodies a
predestined encounter between two countries, two languages and cultures,
and of course, two geniuses.64 In a brief critical article, Mandiargues himself
286 TSWL, 34.2, Fall 2015reflects on his dramatic endeavor, explaining his attraction to his heroine
whose poems he translated in order to interpret her life’s drama and to
give her homage: “Sur le sujet de cette ‘héroine,’ voici une courte pièce,
qui vient lui rendre hommage . . . . Des poèmes d’Isabella Morra traduits
illustrent, en quelque façon, le drame” (On the subject of this ‘heroine,’
here is a short play that wants to honor her . . . . Some of Isabella Morra’s
translated poems somehow illustrate her drama).65 Undoubtedly, Morra’s
life and work lend themselves flawlessly to the production of a theatri-
cal tragedy in which her personal tribulations are shared by her audience
through not only the dramatic performance on stage but also through the
recitation of her poetry. However, Mandiargues, unlike Toffanin, argues
that it is her poems that illustrate her drama, thus allowing his play to be
directed by her verses rather than her life. Mandiargues’s play is a celebra-
tion of Morra’s life and poetry at the epicenter of the rhizome because, at
this juncture and in the textual space of the play, her verses become her
and she becomes her verses. The actress who plays Morra reincarnates not
only Morra the poet but also her poetry, as it is her poetry that has survived
death, history, and time.
Morra’s afterlife continues to establish connections and generate com-
munities. In 2008, the Italian singer-songwriter Alessio Lega composed a
song with and for Morra, fashioning a social commentary to protest vio-
lence against women.66 Lega weaves his song with one of Morra’s sonnets,
“D’un alto monte onde si scorge il mare,” a performance that connects the
sixteenth-century poet with the modern cantastorie (singer-song-writer) as
well as with her readers and his listeners (see appendix 2). In A Thousand
Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari compare music to a rhizome, as they both
produce and sustain lines of flight: “Music has always sent out lines of
flight, like so many ‘transformational multiplicities,’ even overturning
the very codes that structure or arborify it; that is why musical form, right
down to its ruptures and proliferations, is comparable to a weed, a rhizome”
(p. 13). Lega’s lyrics develop on the page but subsequently stretch and
multiply outside the text. His notes reach different dimensions, creating
communities of letters, music, writers, singers, and composers. Since the
lyrics are posted with translations into English and French on the website
Canzoni Contro la Guerra (Anti-war songs) and a performance of the song
can be viewed on YouTube, Morra’s afterlife continues on the Internet.67
In Lega’s opening stanza, Morra is gazing at the sea looking for somebody
who might rescue her from the fraternal prison:
Sopra la rocca c’è Isabella, anima mia,
Consuma gli occhi e guarda il mare
Messa in prigione dai fratelli, bella mia
Chi vuol venirla a liberare?
287(High in the castle, Isabel lies, woe to my soul,
Looking at the sea, wearing her eyes out,
Put into prison by her brothers, woe to my soul,
Who will then come and set her free?)
The song is composed of four stanzas, entwined with four from Morra’s
sonnet. Her stanzas and Lega’s alternate irregularly as in a musical duet
with both voices equally audible. The song’s refrain “anima mia” (woe to
my soul), repeated both lyrically and melodically from the first to the last
stanza, shortens the distance between the two artists to create an intimate
dialogue with both his and her audiences. The word soul, “alma,” is in fact
repeated in four of Morra’s sonnets and in all three of her canzoni, showing
that Lega paid close attention to the importance of the poet’s vocabulary.68
Morra’s “alma” becomes the modern “anima,” and the possessive “anima
mia” establishes a more intimate, unbroken conversation between the
poet and the singer and thus between the communities that they both
created. Moreover, the melancholic song closely echoes Morra’s themes of
solitude, despair, hope, hopelessness, tears, prison, and fraternal mistreat-
ment. Mostly, it renarrates Morra’s compositions and the drama of her life.
Her voice is not only distinctly heard but also reverberates in the singer-
songwriter’s question, twice repeated, “Chi vuol venirla a liberare?” (Who
will come and set her free?), which recalls Morra’s verses:
D’un alto monte onde si scorge il mare
miro sovente io, tua figlia Isabella
s’alcun legno spalmato in quello appare
che di te, padre, a me doni novella.69
(From a high mountain where one can see the sea
I, your daughter Isabella, often look
to see if any ship appears, lost in the waves
that might bring me news of you, my father.)
Solitude and despair surround the narrator who, in gazing at the sea, hopes
to see a friendly messenger with news of her father, her only hope for res-
cue from endless imprisonment and neglect. This conversation between
the early modern and modern communities reaffirms Morra’s afterlife
along with her prolific intellectual and lyric legacy. Because Lega wrote
with Morra but also about Morra, his song preserves as well an intertex-
tual dialogue with Mandiargues’s play. The playwright and the cantastorie
appropriated her words by writing, reading, acting, and singing new virtual
communities. As with the communities discussed above, these too extend
outside the textual space crafted by the sixteenth-century poligrafi. While
Mandiargues dialogues with Morra on the stage, Lega sings with her in
the many venues through which music is circulated. Over the centuries,
288 TSWL, 34.2, Fall 2015her poems have generated varied communities, be they textual, virtual,
or both.70 These types of communities, as Julie D. Campbell and Anne R.
Larsen have noted, “were the essential matrices of literary production for
early modern women on the Continent and in England.”71
In this study, I have discussed how the afterlife of Morra’s poetry has
generated textual and virtual communities. I have also illustrated how
some of her editors have manipulated her authorial function, showing
that, as Chang notes, “female authorship takes radically different forms and
assumes diverse functions and values, varying even when technically the
‘same’ author figure is in question” (p. 22). This is especially the case for
Morra’s miniature canzoniere, for its compact form is easily absorbed into
different genres, allowing editors and critics, playwrights and songwriters
alike to integrate it into their own narrative. An organic rhizomorphic
model is helpful in understanding Morra’s prolific afterlife through which
virtual communities engage and re-engage. The rhizomes are represented
by networks of poligrafi such as the bookseller Passero and the editors
Dolce and Domenichi; literary critics such as Gubernatis and Croce; col-
lectors such as Bulifon, Bergalli, and Toffanin; and creative artists such
as Mandiargues and Lega. The importance of her first editors, especially
Domenichi, cannot be overstated because they provided a cultural and
editorial model for presenting a woman poet to her audience, thereby
determining most of her afterlife’s materializations.
Morra’s poetry can be viewed productively as a socially embedded
manuscript, part of not only the cultural fabric of early modern textual
production but also a community that is presently unfolding and prolif-
erating on the dominant virtual environment of the Internet.72 Her texts
have undergone significant changes while being transmitted, as has her
authorial persona. In Domenichi’s anthology, Morra is portrayed as a virgin
who desperately longs for human kinship, love, recognition, and finally
death, hence turning her thoughts toward God in search of consolation.73
All editors who published her complete works after 1560 referred to this
publication and to the sequence of her poems, and all were influenced by
the same spiritual itinerary that Domenichi crafted in composing her min-
iature canzoniere.74 This influence is echoed in the ways in which Bulifon
altered Morra’s poems in 1693, as well as in his comprehensive adoption of
Domenichi’s collection in 1695. Domenichi’s attempt at revising Morra’s
poetic corpus to make it more spiritual is a practice adopted by many male
editors of early modern women writers, a practice that reveals, in Jones’s
terms: “the historically gendered assumptions on which the canonization
of early modern European women poets has proceeded—the insistent
289narratives, we may find, that have shaped the treatment of women writ-
ing in other times and places as well” (p. 288). Bergalli’s volume of 1726,
however, appears to be a novel endeavor in shaping a true community of
women writers in the eighteenth century, when women’s intellectual life in
society had become a much-debated issue.75 The Componimenti poetici delle
più illustri rimatrici d’ogni secolo embodies Bergalli’s attempt to bring back
to light women poets such as Morra and position them in a new thriving
virtual community.
After the initial print network of Morra’s poems developed, it quickly
spread. In Gubernatis’s “Il romanzo d’una poetessa,” her poems are com-
bined with his narrative to reveal a different story. In Toffanin’s Le più
belle pagine di Gaspara Stampa, Vittoria Colonna, Veronica Gàmbara, Isabella
Morra, her poems are introduced by titles. In framing them, both editors
were more concerned with Morra’s tragic life and death than with her poe-
try. Hence, Morra’s communities and her afterlife prove that her texts are
inseparable from the social and cultural contexts created not by the author
herself but by her editors. Who can resist a tale of suffering, isolation, and
a gripping triple murder at the hands of three brothers? Morra’s life events
became a myth, and the myth became intertwined with her poetry as soon
as Passero sent it to Dolce. Throughout the centuries, it became hard to
discern if her myth was constructed through her poetry or if her life events
were constructing the sequence of her poetry. Undoubtedly, Morra’s death
was the catalyst for her publication and for the emergence of her author-
ship. Because of her untimely death, we cannot know her intentions as to
if and when she wished to be published. However, her desire for a dialogue
and a community with her readers, so fiercely and candidly expressed in her
tragic monologues, is a clear indication that she did long for her poetry to
become public, to cross the thick walls of her prison, and to reach the intel-
lectual viceroy court in Naples and the brilliant court of Francis I in Paris
in the company of her father and other poets such as Luigi Alamanni.76
As some of her verses show, Morra did imagine an afterlife for her poems.
Should “Scrissi con stile amaro, aspro e dolente” not appear as the first son-
net since it expresses the author’s reflections on her own writing and on
her own textual existence and transmittal?77 Her “stile” creates her poem
as a material product, in which a reader is imagined, “come sai” (as you
know) and referred to as a habitual and loyal listener.78 Her humble apology
implies that Morra viewed herself as an author whose work was destined
to have a prolific afterlife of its own. Her lament can be heard when she
claims that her writings did not meet any praise: “spendo il mio tempo
senza loda alcuna” (I spend my time without any praise).79
I would like to suggest, finally, that Deleuze and Guattari’s organic and
regenerative concept offers a useful theoretical model for Morra’s afterlife
because of her complete absence in ordering her poems and crafting her own
290 TSWL, 34.2, Fall 2015publishing history. Her afterlife took off, organically developed, and created
connections as a rhizome does. Perhaps this model is useful for comparing
and contrasting the afterlife of other Renaissance women writers who have
been anthologized, hence providing an additional methodology to better
appreciate their reincarnations, for example, in textual communities such
as those crafted by Bergalli and Gubernatis. Employing this model would
furthermore confirm the importance of women’s intellectual roles in shap-
ing early modern and modern culture and literature, would underscore the
connections between poligrafi, writers, and readers, and would shed light on
the intellectual impact of their work’s transmission and afterlife.
GABRIELLA SCARLATTA ESCHRICH is Associate Professor of French
and Italian at the University of Michigan, Dearborn, and Associate Dean
in the College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters. She has published articles on
early modern poetry, baroque authors, and Renaissance women writers. Her
manuscript, “The Poetry of the Disperata: From the Italian Middle Ages to
the End of the French Renaissance” is currently under consideration. One
chapter is dedicated to Isabella di Morra’s poetry of despair.
NOTES
All translations of titles and quotes are provided by the author unless otherwise
noted. A full list of Isabella di Morra’s poems with translated titles appears in
appendix 1. I want to thank my colleague Julie Campbell for reading a first version
of this article, as well as Laura Stevens and Karen Dutoi for their careful editing
and invaluable suggestions.
1
Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?,” in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in
Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué Halari (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1979), 158. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
2
For accounts of how Isabella di Morra’s poems were found and subsequently cir-
culated, see Benedetto Croce, Isabella di Morra e Diego Sandoval de Castro [Isabella di
Morra and Diego Sandoval de Castro] (Bari: Laterza, 1929), 28; and Diana Robin,
“Morra, Isabella di (ca 1520-1545),” in Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance:
Italy, France, and England, ed. Anne R. Larsen, Robin, and Carole Levin (Santa
Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2007), 274-76. Robin convincingly argues that fellow
poet Diego Sandoval de Castro might have disseminated Morra’s poems in Naples’s
literary circles.
3
For an excellent discussion of female authorship, see Leah L. Chang, Into Print:
The Production of Female Authorship in Early Modern France (Newark: University of
Delaware Press, 2009). For definitions of community, see Rebecca D’Monté and
Nicole Pohl’s introduction to Female Communities, 1600-1800: Literary Visions and
Cultural Realities (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000): “communities are based on
principles of inclusion, equality and benevolent economy,” and in particular, vir-
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