uring the Wars of Italy (1494-1559), Italian women writers began to address war in their poetry. This study examines Renaissance women's poetry as it interacts with the historical circumstance of war, with particular focus on the work of Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara.

Many Renaissance noblewomen married elite military men, and the poems they addressed to their absent spouses often focused more on war than love. They approached the dominant tradition of Petrarchan poetry from a negotiated position, accepting its overall ideology but transforming many of its conventions. The introduction of war added levels of complexity to women's lyric: focusing on absence and abandonment, it identified war as the culprit and challenged the absolute privilege granted to honor and glory. These poets contrasted what they perceived as female desire and male desire (the desire of love and the desire for military honor and glory), rarely questioning the dichotomies inherent in war ideology. Meanwhile their epistolary poems to kings and popes focused mainly on achieving domestic peace. In combination with their prose correspondence, their poetry also constituted an avenue for political expression and persuasion otherwise unavailable to women.

The theoretical grounding for this study comes from recent feminist criticism of women's love poetry, in particular the work of Ann Rosalind Jones, which I bring to bear on their political and war poems. Jones argues that women's poetry must be interpreted with an awareness of their authors' specificity as women, shaped by sexual ideologies and the exclusion of women from the world of letters. Criticism of the petrarchiste has often decried their deviation from tradition; this study proposes a reading of women's war poetry in light of its differences and of the unique perspective of Renaissance women on war.

Discussions of war inevitably invoke societal values. Renaissance women poets struggled to find a voice amidst ideologies of gender, ideologies of war, and the strict conventions of their poetic genre. An analysis of women's war poetry can serve to clarify not only the ideologies specific to the Renaissance but also those structures common to the genres of war literature and love lyric.