The Social World of Italian Lyric

Professor Virginia Cox (Trinity College, University of Cambridge) presented her current book project, provisionally entitled ‘The Social World of Italian Lyric (1550-1600)’, at the co-hosted event on 4 June 2024, fruits of the collaboration between the Early Modern Italian World Seminar program and the Faculty of Medieval & Modern Languages Italian Research Seminar series.

True to the interdisciplinary theme of the seminar, Professor Cox, a renowned specialist in Italian Renaissance and Reformation literature, interweaves literary, social and political history in her latest research that centres on the late 16th century tradition of ‘social lyric’. The term, coined by Professor Cox, refers to the much overlooked genre of ‘occasional verse’ and a wider range of poetry that thematizes social relationships or collectively experienced events. Despite the prevalence of this sub-genre of poetry, accounting for approximately forty percent of lyric output in the later 16th century after love poetry and religious poetry, there is a profound absence of critical scholarship on this tradition of verse. Professor Cox’s book project aims to rescue from oblivion this ‘deeply unfashionable genre of poetry written at a deeply unfashionable time in a series of deeply unfashionable places’. The study particularly inclines towards works produced in Italy’s border lands, such as Friuli and Bergamo, that are particularly rich in collections of social poetry which negotiate and represent complex social and political realities. At the same time, the research also intends to address the methodologies and tools that are needed to appreciate this lyric genre which differ from those of more introspective forms of poetry.

Matteo Ponzone, Portrait of Don Angelo Grillo (1557-1629), c. 1611, Padua, Museo d’Arte Medievale e Moderna.

By way of illustration, Professor Cox drew on the case study of Angelo Grillo’s Rime morali (or Parte prima delle rime) (1589). Grillo (1557-1629) is recognized as one of the most significant Italian poets between Torquato Tasso (1544-1595) and Giambattista Marino (1569-1625) on the basis of his religious verse and the transitional figure between late renaissance and baroque poetry. Grillo’s secular work, on the other hand, has almost been entirely overlooked by the existing scholarship as religious poetry and love poetry have dominated the focus of criticism in this period.

Angelo Grillo, 'Parte prima delle rime del Sig. don Angelo Grillo', Bergamo: Comino Ventura, 1589

Grillo, born in Genoa in 1557, joined the Benedictine order as a novice and embarked on the itinerant life of the Cassinese congregation. Most well-known for his advocacy and negotiation on behalf of Tasso’s release from the Ospedale di S. Anna in 1585, Grillo returned to the monastery of S. Caterina in Genoa in 1587, the year in which his first major contribution to a poetry anthology, Rime di diversi celebri poeti dell'età nostra, was published. In this volume, Grillo’s verses appear in his own name and that of a pseudonym, Livio Celiano, under which he wrote love poetry (which has only been latterly attributed to Grillo since 1989). Grillo’s first single authored work was released in 1589, Prima parte delle rime, that made up the first part, ‘Rime morali’, of a two part publication, with the second part comprising of ‘Rime spirituali’. The Prima parte delle rime amounts to the most important collection of Grillo’s secular work containing a sequence of 240 poems, largely sonnets and some canzone, followed by 62 correspondent sonnets. The poems are accompanied by an elaborate contextualising index composed by Grillo’s young Genovese friend, Giulio Guastavini, that forms a supplement and counterpoint to the verse.

Angelo Grillo, 'Parte prima delle rime del Sig. don Angelo Grillo', Bergamo: Comino Ventura, 1589

Though emanating from Genova and, therefore, technically not representing a border culture in the same way as other social lyric collections, the Prima parte delle rime does share the same qualities in its portrayal of a complex political community and the social tensions which underpinned it. Grillo’s vast volume provides a fascinating perspective of the period featuring a cast of 193 named figures, including addressees, subjects, contributors, and dedicatees. The combination of social lyric and prose commentary offers a hugely valuable cultural and socio-historical reflection on the Genovese social and cultural elites, as well as showcasing Grillo himself as a mediator of Genovese identity towards other civil and courtly circles in northern Italy of the period.

Professor Cox discussed the role of the Prima parte delle rime within Grillo’s cultural program to establish Genoa as a principal site for the promotion of the new poetic culture represented by Tasso. Grillo’s poems aggressively put Genova on the literary map at a pivotal moment in the history of Genovese culture at the end of the 16th century as the republic transitioned itself from the margins of Italian cultural developments into one of the great European cultural capitals of the Baroque period. Poems within Grillo’s collection are addressed to musicians and artists of the age, and also help to illuminate contemporary Genovese cultural activities in other ways. The core of the work, however, is dedicated to depicting an idealized cultural portrait of the Genovese patrician, especially of the old nobility and members of the Spinola family (Grillo’s maternal family). Grillo’s poems are intended as a moral exhortation to the Genovese nobility disguised in the form of praise, as Professor Cox explains, portraying how the nobility should act rather than perhaps the reality. Of particular interest is Grillo’s extensive description of Genovese women patricians and their virtues, which comprises approximately a third of the volume which he dedicates to women.

Members of the Faculty of History and Department of Italian gained an incredible insight from Professor Cox’s presentation into this little-studied genre of social lyric and eagerly await the publication of her research that reveals a fascinating source of cultural and moral material on the period which remains almost entirely untouched to date.

Report by Victoria White, Balliol College, DPhil Medieval and Modern Languages