ABSTRACT
It is not my intention in this chapter to explore systematically the entire corpus of Italian vernacular spiritual poetry of the sixteenth century, its general features and its most notable authors. Rather, my aim is to consider in detail a limited number of collections of varying renown, all notable because they circulated principally in manuscript form. A preliminary remark seems necessary in this regard: namely, that any discussion of the scribal circulation of poetry in the mid-sixteenth century necessarily restricts itself to a small number of examples, compared to the more mainstream production of printed books of verse that was fed by ongoing and fruitful communication between poets, printers and readers. A further preliminary remark concerns the choice of the term spiritual poetry. It is legitimate to call spiritual that particular kind of lyric poetry that originated from Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, frequently found within many works of the sixteenth century, usually occupying the final section of a profane collection of love lyrics and concentrating on matters of repentance and prayer. On the other hand, it is also evident that, especially during the watershed years between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, this way of conceiving of spiritual poetry is superseded by an alternative model, the production of collections of spiritual poems as intentionally separate and distinguished from collections of profane verse.
