Giulia Gonzaga

by

Camilla Russell

• LAST MODIFIED: 24 October 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195399301-0537

Introduction

Giulia Gonzaga (b. 1513–d. 1566) was a celebrated and controversial figure during her lifetime: she was a leading protagonist in late-Italian Renaissance culture and above all in the religious upheavals that gripped Europe during the sixteenth century. Born in Gazzuolo near Mantua in northern Italy, she was a member of the powerful Gonzaga family (from a cadet branch of Mantua’s ruling dynasty); in her role as duchess of Gaeta and Fondi, as the young widow of Vespasiano Colonna (d. 1528; they married in 1526), from the Colonna family castle at Fondi (between Rome and Naples), her court attracted many visitors and admirers (including Ippolito de’ Medici, destined instead for the cardinal’s hat and an early death by suspected poisoning): Sebastiano del Piombo painted her portrait and poetic and prose works lauded her beauty and chronicled her narrow nocturnal escape from one of the frequent coastal raids of the corsair Khair ad-dīn (or Barbarossa, in 1534), who landed at Fondi apparently with the intention of capturing Gonzaga for the harem of Sulemein I. As the result of a bitter inheritance dispute with her almost coetaneous stepdaughter Isabella Colonna, Gonzaga’s permanent move to Naples, in 1535, to the Clarissan convent San Francesco alle Monache (where she won papal dispensation to reside without taking the veil), marked the beginning of her most noteworthy role as a member, patron, and leader of the religious heterodox reforming circle known as the spirituali. Their leader, Spanish religious exile Juan de Valdés (who assisted Gonzaga in her legal dispute with her stepdaughter) brought a distinctive spiritual outlook, while his many religious writings and commentaries attracted scores of (especially elite) followers in the mid-1530s, first among whom was Gonzaga. Their religious circle at Naples was part of a wider confluence of ideas and like-minded people, including many women, who were based at various locations across Italy, such as Viterbo, Modena, Venice, and Rome, under the leadership of the likes of Reginald Pole, Giovanni Morone, and Gasparo Contarini. From the early 1540s, the spirituali became the focus of suspicion from the newly reinstated Roman Inquisition because of their ideas’ resemblance to the teachings of Martin Luther and John Calvin, especially the doctrine of justification by faith alone through grace and, in some cases, predestination. After the death of Valdés in 1541, Gonzaga assumed leadership of the Neapolitan circle and became custodian and promoter of spirituali writings, many of which she had published: she was also a protector of various members, especially the Florentine noble Pietro Carnesecchi, whose correspondence with Gonzaga provided the main evidence at his heresy trial and execution by the Roman Inquisition in 1567, one year after Gonzaga’s death, in Naples, in 1566. Since Gonzaga outlived many of her spirituali peers and remained in Italy while some of her associates fled over the Alps to Protestant lands, Gonzaga stands as an important example of the persistence of heterodox reformist tendencies in Italy during the Tridentine era.

General Overviews

Giulia Gonzaga, while attracting a great deal of attention during her lifetime, has fared less well since then in terms of serious biographical studies. These can be grouped into two broad thematic frames connected to Renaissance and Reformation historiographies. Couched in nostalgia for the Italian Renaissance, Affò 1787 presents Gonzaga alongside other notable Gonzaga “princesses” in his laudatory portrait of the female members of the Gonzaga family. Amante 1896 was the first quality biography that cast Gonzaga in both her Renaissance and Reformation contexts and was underpinned by his era’s empiricist methodologies including extensive quotations from original sources by and about Gonzaga. Pan-European attention followed, from scholars in the early twentieth century who were interested in the relationship between Gonzaga, her religious ideas and associates, and the events of the Reformation played out in the Italian lands—sometimes known as the Italian Reformation—including Benrath 1900 (German); Paladino 1909 (Italian); and Hare 1912 (English). Through these works, Giulia Gonzaga entered historiography as a noted female figure within the history of the European Protestant Reformations. Bainton 1971 places Giulia Gonzaga alongside other known female religious reforming figures in Italy and Germany. Brundin 2008 links the religious ideas and circles of Vittoria Colonna to Giulia Gonzaga, while Robin 2007 (cited under Renaissance Historiography) identifies the distinctly female character of the circles in which Gonzaga participated between Naples and Ischia, which were interested in religious reform. In the 1990s several entries in the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation cemented Giulia Gonzaga’s reputation as a key figure in the history of the Reformation in Italy, for example Prosperi and Shillenn 1996. Dall’Olio 2001 launched the twenty-first century’s scholarly attention to the figure of Giulia Gonzaga, followed by Russell 2006 (the first full-length academic monograph dedicated to Gonzaga in modern times), and Peyronel Rambaldi 2012 (in Italian) and its reissue in English Peyronel Rambaldi 2021.

• Affò, Ireneo. Memorie di tre celebri Principesse della famiglia Gonzaga. Parma, Italy: dalla stamperia Carmignani, 1787.

  A laudatory portrait nostalgically celebrating the height of the Italian Renaissance through the lives of three Gonzaga women, including Giulia.

• Amante, Bruto. Giulia Gonzaga Contessa di Fondi e il movimento religioso femminile nel secolo XVI. Bologna, Italy: N. Zanichelli, 1896.

  First full-length, serious work about the life of Giulia Gonzaga, drawing on extensive original documentation, including a large and well-chosen appendix, highlighting the key role played by Gonzaga in the “female” religious reforming moment of mid-sixteenth-century Italy.

• Bainton, Roland H. Women of the Reformation in Germany and Italy. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1971.

  Enters Protestant Reformation historiography about women reformers in bother German and Italian lands.

• Benrath, Karl. Julia Gonzaga. Ein Lebensbild aus der Geschichte der Reformation in Italien. Halle, Germany: Verein für reformationsgeschichte, 1900.

  An example of confessional historiography, identifying Giulia Gonzaga as one of the female leaders of the Protestant Reform movement in sixteenth-century Italy.

• Brundin, Abigail. Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008.

  The literary, religious, and social world of Vittoria Colonna is recreated here in the first modern monograph-length study of Vittoria Colonna; includes Vittoria Colonna’s association with Giulia Gonzaga, confirming their presence as fellow-reform-minded women and members of the spirituali.

• Dall’Olio, Guido. “Gonzaga, Giulia”. In Dizionario biografico degli italiani Vol. 57. 783–787. Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 2001.

  In this brief entry, a scholarly treatment of Giulia Gonzaga and the relevant related sources and historical contexts, is set out as a foundation on which later scholarly treatments may reliably draw.

• Hare, Christopher. A Princess of the Italian Reformation: Giulia Gonzaga 1513–1566. Her Family and Her Friends. London: Harper & Bros, 1912.

  Giulia Gonzaga enters the British Protestant historiography as a leader of the Italian Reformation

• Paladino, Giuseppe. Giulia Gonzaga e il movimento valdesiano. Naples, Italy: F. Sangiovanni, 1909.

  Identifies the relationship between Juan de Valdés, Giulia Gonzaga, and the religious movement of Naples, using extensive original documentation

• Peyronel Rambaldi, Susanna. Una gentildonna irrequieta: Giulia Gonzaga fra reti familiari e relazioni eterodosse. Rome: Viella, 2012.

  The less-studied political underpinnings of Giulia Gonzaga’s family and religious networks, as well as the factor of Gonzaga’s social rank in the nature of her works and associations, are the focus of this biography, which was reissued by the publisher in English in the form of Peyronel Rambaldi 2021 (cited under Renaissance Historiography).

• Prosperi, Adriano, and Robert E. Shillenn. “Italy”. In The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation. 4 vols, No. 2. Edited Hans J. Hillebrand, 324–329. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

  This entry, along with several others in the multi-volume work, positions Giulia Gonzaga in the context of the spirituali and in particular the Neapolitan circle of Juan de Valdés, as leading protagonists in the religious environment of Italy at the time of the Reformation.

• Russell, Camilla. Giulia Gonzaga and the Religious Controversies of Sixteenth Century Italy. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2006.

  DOI: 10.1484/M.LMEMS-EB.5.112210

  The first academic monograph in English dedicated to Giulia Gonzaga and her religious ideas, correspondence, and associates. It draws on the letters between Gonzaga and Pietro Carnesecchi, preserved as part of the latter’s Inquisition trial records (first available to general scholarship in 1998).