User:Serial Number 54129/Maria Roscoe (née Fletcher)

Maria Roscoe (1798-1885) is the author of Vittoria Colonna: Her Life and Times (Macmillan & Co, 1868). The granddaughter of William Enfield, she married Henry Roscoe in 1831 and had two children, Henry Enfield Roscoe and Harriet Roscoe. Her work on Colonna is considered an important contribution to the Roscoe family tradition of Italian Renaissance scholarship, and is an example of a woman writing on theological subjects, using the form of biography to make that work socially acceptable. The work is an early examination of the experiences of a woman in history, particularly during the reformation.

Life

Relatively little is known about Roscoe's life, and much of it comes from sources related to her male relatives. She was born in 1798, the second daughter of Thomas Fletcher, a Liverpool merchant. Her grandfather, William Enfield, was a prominent British Unitarian minister and nonconformist educator. Her future father-in-law, William Roscoe, was a member of Enfield's church in Liverpool and received encouragement for his writing from Enfield. She married Henry Roscoe, the tenth child of William Roscoe, on October 29, 1831, but was widowed only 5 years later, on March 25, 1836, when he died of consumption. Maria Roscoe was left with two small children, Harriet and Henry. She took up teaching painting at a school for girls in Rodney Street, Liverpool, that was run by her cousins, and moved the family from a large house in Gateacre, near Liverpool, into a cottage nearby. In 1842 Roscoe moved to Liverpool, and according to Sir Henry's memoir, decided to enroll him in the High School of the Liverpool Institute, having recognized that a classical education would not suit him. When Henry moved to London to attend University College London in 1848, Maria and Harriet followed, and the three lived first in Torrington Square, with 2 of Maria's nephews, and then later on Oval Road in Camden Town, with two other nephews. In London she was also friendly with her brother-in-law, Charles John Crompton (later Sir Charles), who had married Maria's sister Caroline, and who had also worked in a professional capacity with Maria's late husband, Henry Roscoe. In spring 1854, Maria travelled to Germany, where her son Henry had gone to study in Heidelberg, taking with her Harriet and Harriet's fiancé Edward Enfield, and in the summer, Harriet and Edward were married in Berne. In 1856, Maria sets up house for her son Henry back in London, where he had taken a post at University College, and in 1857 moves to Manchester with him when he is offered a post at Owens College. Henry writes that he "lived happily with [his] mother" in Manchester until he married in 1863, but includes no information about what his mother did at that juncture. Only two additional pieces of information are provided by Sir Henry's memoirs relating to his mother: that she is the author of Vittoria Colonna: Her Life and Times and that she died peacefully in 1885.

Works

Roscoe's biography of Colonna fits into several traditions of biography and historiography of the period. An increased interest in Renaissance culture can be seen in the number of works coming out both before and after Roscoe's book dealing with Renaissance subjects in history, fine art, and literature, including two books, Life of Lorenzo de'Medici (1796) and Life and Pontificate of Leo X (1805) by Roscoe's father-in-law, William Roscoe, and a collection of Italian prose edited and translated by her brother-in-law, Thomas Roscoe, titled The Italian Novelists. Other prominent works in Italian Renaissance history and literature of the period include Leopold von Ranke's Die römischen Päpste, ihre kirche und ihr Staat im sechzehnten und siebzehnten Jahrhundert (1834-36), translated into English by Sarah Austin (1847); Henry Hallam's Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries (1837-39); Jacob Burckhardt's Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860), published in S.G.C. Middlemore's English translation as The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy in 1878; Walter Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873); and John Addington Symonds's massive 7-volume Renaissance in Italy, published between 1875 and 1886. Roscoe's biography draws on a number of these works as sources, including Hallam, Ranke, and William Roscoe's Life of Leo X.

Unlike most of these works, however, which focus either on broad descriptions of Italian Renaissance culture or on the lives of particular historical men, Roscoe's biography focuses on the role of a woman both in regard to her own life and within the context of the political and religious movements that were taking place around her. Colonna is mentioned in many of these works (e.g. Roscoe's Life and Pontificate of Leo X vol 3; Symonds's Renaissance in Italy: Italian Literature part 2 These mentions, however, are notable partly in their brevity. Other texts that focus more on woman writers or women of note do exist from the period, but these tend to be compilations of the biographies of several women, for example T. Adolphus Trollope's 1859 Decade of Italian Women or Anna Jameson's The Loves of the Poets (1829, reprinted several times under slightly different titles).

Roscoe's work thus departs from this tradition by centering Colonna as the subject of a lengthy biography, although she does still use the volume to include several large digressions on political and religious issues that involved Colonna. The choice to write about Colonna as partly a way to write about these historical events may have been in part a ploy to allow Roscoe to write on these topics, but enough text is indeed dedicated to discussing Colonna's own life and history that there is no doubt that this is a biography of Colonna first and foremost.

Several later works continue Roscoe's project of singling out Colonna as worthy of attention, including Alethea Lawley's shorter work Vittoria Colonna: A Study, with translations of some of her published and unpublished sonnets; and the anonymous The "In Memoriam" of Italy, consisting of translations of 100 poems by Colonna.

Although Roscoe is not known for any other work, her biography of Colonna is noteworthy as an early example of a single-subject biography of a Renaissance woman. By taking a woman as her subject, Roscoe gives herself space to engage with the current historiography of the Renaissance, and in particular with the religious movements of early Church reform. She also, however, situates a woman as a key connecting figure within that history, a significant claim that departs from the earlier portrayals of Colonna as simply happening to have been there and to have shared their ideas. Roscoe's biography paradoxically presents a private and retired virtuous woman of the Victorian mold who nonetheless was engaged in discussions and communication with some of the key figures of her time.