Ramie Targoff

Harvard Book Store welcomes Brandeis University professor RAMIE TARGOFF for a discussion of her latest book Renaissance Woman: The Life of Vittoria Colonna.

About Renaissance Woman

Ramie Targoff’s Renaissance Woman tells of the most remarkable woman of the Italian Renaissance: Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa of Pescara. Vittoria has long been celebrated by scholars of Michelangelo as the artist’s best friend―the two of them exchanged beautiful letters, poems, and works of art that bear witness to their intimacy―but she also had close ties to Charles V, Pope Clement VII and Pope Paul III, Pietro Bembo, Baldassare Castiglione, Pietro Aretino, Queen Marguerite de Navarre, Reginald Pole, and Isabella d’Este, among others. Vittoria was the scion of an immensely powerful family in Rome during that city’s most explosively creative era. Art and literature flourished, but political and religious life were under terrific strain. Personally involved with nearly every major development of this period―through both her marriage and her own talents―Vittoria was not only a critical political actor and negotiator but also the first woman to publish a book of poems in Italy, an event that launched a revolution for Italian women’s writing. Vittoria was, in short, at the very heart of what we celebrate when we think about sixteenth-century Italy; through her story, the Renaissance comes to life anew.

Praise

“I was engrossed, inspired, and moved by the story of this groundbreaking, contradictory, and overlooked literary figure. Ramie Targoff brings Vittoria Colonna to life with a novelist’s flair for plot, detail, and character. Her passion for her subject is contagious, and her analysis of Renaissance culture is both scrupulous and empathetic, at once erudite and richly dramatic.” ―Jhumpa Lahiri, author of In Other Words

“‘May the holy nails now be my quills,’ wrote Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa di Pescara, in one of her shattering sonnets, a profession of her dedication to the suffering of Christ through the writing of poetry. ‘And may his precious blood be my ink.’ Ramie Targoff’s learned and powerful account of the lavishly wealthy sixteenth-century Italian noblewoman who wanted to be a nun as much as she wanted to write unlocks this much-overlooked Renaissance woman from the prison of the poet’s own making―the prison of her grief―and from another prison, too: the prison of the archives, from which Renaissance Woman has at last released her.” ―Jill Lepore, author of The Secret History of Wonder Woman

“One of the most glamorous women of the Renaissance, Vittoria Colonna, well-born and gifted, friend of Michelangelo, rich in every sense, has finally received the attention she deserves. No wonder it has taken so long: Vittoria’s life and career require a biographer with research skills, scholarly dedication, linguistic brilliance, wide-ranging knowledge, and writing talent―combined with a passionate interest in women’s lives―that Ramie Targoff may be alone in possessing. Many will be grateful to her for giving us so extraordinary and inspiring a heroine.” ―Phyllis Rose, author of Parallel Lives