SOURCE: Braden, Gordon. “Gaspara Stampa and the Gender of Petrarchism.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 38, no. 2 (summer 1996): 115-39.

[In the following essay, Braden argues that Stampa's work may have been the dominant paradigm of female Petrarchism. He examines Stampa's Rime d'amore, citing it as one of the most distinguished and exemplary sonnet sequences of the period.]

The immense fact of Petrarchism gives Renaissance literature some of its most obvious insignia of continuity and coherence, but we have not been especially resourceful in assessing what they mean or even in keeping track of what they are. There is no circumstantial history of the international phenomenon as a whole; the catalogue of the Petrarch collection at Cornell University is perhaps the closest thing,¹ and even casual reading in its primary texts is apt to turn up surprises for scholars who thought they knew what they were going to find. Part of the problem is the multilingual vastness of the material—which in the fullest definition includes texts in sixteenth-century Croatian and demotic Cypriot—but the field of Renaissance studies copes with that all the time. There is something extra in this particular tradition which has resisted patient assimilation. The erotic trance at its emotional center is in some ways instantly familiar, even humiliatingly so—modern students understand it when you call it a crush—but its prolonged elaboration in uncountably similar poems tends to be alien to contemporary sensibilities, a program that (like other people's obsessions generally) manages to be simultaneously tedious and bizarre, both boring and a little alarming. When practical criticism deals with a poem's relation to Petrarchan conventions, it often puts its energy—as if this were mere common sense—into detecting deviation from those conventions and interpreting that deviation agonistically. The usual way in our profession to appreciate a specimen of Renaissance Petrarchism is to celebrate its attempt to break out of that category. There are times when such a perspective is clearly called for (“no such Roses see I in her cheekes”). There are also times, many times, when presenting a nuance as a rupture is not much more than a rhetorical decision on the part of the interpreter. Sorting such matters out will require a steadier, more informed effort of historical sympathy than we have yet been able to manage.

I do not know how widely this need is felt. References to Petrarchism in recent criticism (particularly English-language criticism) often imply that we largely know what to make of it now—an impression due, perhaps, to the conceptual power of a pair of famous essays by John Freccero and Nancy Vickers.² Both essays are brief and, despite some allusions to the forthcoming tradition, are focused on Petrarch himself; neither is part of a systematic larger study (Vickers's was said to be part of one, but it has not appeared). Yet it is not uncommon to find either or both of them invoked (they do not say the same thing, but they can be made to work together) as an acknowledged synthesis of what Petrarchism comes to, without much in the way of independent verification, for the purpose, usually, of defining the subversiveness of the poet to hand. There are reasons for this: both essays do what they do quite well, and not only do they seem to offer a way around a mass of unbeguiling reading matter, but they also help give a name to the distaste modern readers tend to feel in its presence. But the result has at times been a distortion that doesn't have to happen.

I am not much concerned here with Freccero's essay, which I think has proved the more reliable and useful. Vickers's argument is the more complicated, much of it worked out in commandingly intricate close readings. The influential thesis, however, is a tangent drawn from those readings into the future: “Silencing Diana [in Petrarch's Canzoniere 23] is an emblematic gesture; it suppresses a voice, and it casts generations of would-be Lauras in a role predicated upon the muteness of its player.”³ Depriving the worshipped woman of speech is part of the nature and, indeed, the purpose of Petrarchism. Much of the work of the essay goes into making this conclusion look like a consequence of more readily recognized features of the tradition, notably its style of idealized physical description. The assembled result jumps from literary analysis into social history, with Petrarchism one of the vehicles by which the status of women in early modern Europe is subtly but firmly degraded:

First, Petrarch's figuration of Laura informs a decisive stage in the development of a code of beauty, a code that causes us to view the fetishized body as a norm. … And second, bodies fetishized by a poetic voice logically do not have a voice of their own; the world of making words, of making texts, is not theirs.⁴

Among other things, apparently, the dominance of Petrarchism helps explain why more women did not pursue a literary career; it is the means by which an oppressive ideology of gender relations gains power over first-person lyric utterance.

This thesis has been generalized and sometimes coarsened by others:

The logic of love-poetry in the Renaissance is that of the gaze, the discrimination of form and the rendering open and passive of the beautiful object—the woman perceived as territory. … Within such a language situation, the woman can speak only as a blank space, a hole in discourse, or—as a passive recipient of the male organ of speech/sex—within the man's language.⁵

Later critics often do not take Vickers's trouble to deduce the proposition from the material; it indeed can be linked, as is the case here, to an attack on conventional standards of evidence:

Our empiricist methodology—the positivist insistence on observing and analyzing what is given or apparently there in the text—ends in an impasse and an acceptance of discursive limitations which quietly oppress or marginalize our concerns to examine and perhaps challenge the dominant categories not only of our literature but of our history.⁶

That sounds in turn a little like an attempt to place the thesis at hand beyond challenge—though a thesis that declines such challenge is not likely to stay with us.

Gendering Petrarchism as male, of course, second-guesses the usual Renaissance complaint. The standard joke about the Petrarchan lover is his effeminacy:

Be not too apish female, do not come
With foolish Sonets to present her with,
With legs, with curtesies, congies, and such like:
Nor with pend speeches, or too far fetcht sighes,
I hate such antick queint formalitie.(7)

It is not unknown for the targets of such scorn to accept the equation and turn it to feminist account; so Juan Boscán, setting out to introduce Italian lyric forms into Castile and coming up against those who object “that the verses had to be principally for women”:

who is going to waste time responding to them? I consider women of such substance, those who succeed in being so, and many do succeed, that whoever should try to defend them in this matter would offend them. So for these men, and all those of their ilk, they have permission to say what they wish, because I do not plan on being very friendly with them.⁸

Pietro Bembo, more responsible than anyone else for Petrarch's sixteenth-century canonization, is forthright about opening the literary life to women, holding out for them the Petrarchan reward of (if need be) posthumous fame:

If women do not occupy all their free time with those duties which are said to be proper to them, but devote their whole leisure to literary studies and these pursuits [discourses about love], it makes little difference what some men say about it, for sooner or later the world will praise the women for it.⁹

One of the personal experiences behind this stance was a recent love affair with a woman whose letters, dense with Petrarchan allusion and imitation, he would reread in his old age; their joint correspondence is among other things a look at Petrarchism become without apparent effort the language of mutual desire.¹⁰ As a public man in later life he regularly exchanged letters and poems with Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara. The literary world in which Bembo moved indeed becomes the premier site of female lyric poetry in the Renaissance, and not merely in decorous privacy; no fewer than six women published Rime during their own lifetime in Italy (mostly in Venice) between 1538 and 1575.¹¹ Numerous women poets appear in the Giolito anthologies—a de facto canon of contemporary Italian lyric—that appeared from 1545 on;¹² and their main editor, Lodovico Domenichi, took the unprecedented step of producing in 1559 an anthology almost exclusively of women poets (331 poems by 53 different writers).¹³ Possibly in response, scholarly fantasy populated earlier literary history with more female poets than were really there. One myth linked the start of Petrarch's own poetic vocation not just to Laura, but to the inspirational example of a female poet who was said to be the addressee of Canzoniere 7; in some accounts she is one of a circle of similarly gendered writers, whose reputed sonnets sometimes made it into print.¹⁴ Another legend made Laura herself a poet, part of a Cour d'amour of women continuing the art of the troubadours.¹⁵

What such evidence seems to me to suggest is that critical insistence on the maleness of Petrarchism is premature subtlety that blurs the texture of the tradition's historical placement and obscures what is unusual and noteworthy about its place in the grid of gender relations. Petrarchism is masculine, or masculinist, to the extent to which all Renaissance culture deserves that label; we can readily imagine styles of lyric utterance more suitable to what we think woman poets would or should want to say. But within its culture, Petrarchism is a venue in which female aspiration is detectably more welcome than elsewhere, and, insofar as informed guessing is possible, probably did more to encourage than to inhibit female literary activity.

The most important testimony would of course be what we could recover from actual women writers. I want to look in this connection at, I will argue, the most distinguished and exemplary female sonnet sequence of the period, Gaspara Stampa's Rime d'amore (published a few months after her death in 1554—with commendatory sonnets from, among others. Bembo's son Torquato).¹⁶ It is on some levels a momentously innovative sequence, but that innovativeness is inseparable from Stampa's commitment to Petrarchan convention, of which I think she avails herself more effectively than any other woman poet of the age. I would call the result a demonstration of what, if other factors had not been so hostile to female literary ambition, the dominant paradigm of female Petrarchism might have been.

Stampa has drawn a certain amount of recent critical attention, but contemporary preoccupations have not made it easy to appreciate her relation to tradition. “Even if she appropriates certain of its conventions,” Juliana Schiesari writes, “Stampa … rejects the Petrarchan metaphysics of lack that would inscribe her as inferior”;¹⁷ she then quotes from Rime 28:

Quando innanti ai begli occhi almi e lucenti,
per mia rara ventura al mondo, i' vegno,
lo stil, la lingua, l'ardire e l'ingegno,
i pensieri, i concetti e i sentimenti
o restan tutti oppressi o tutti spenti,
e quasi muta e stupida divegno;
o sia la riverenza, in che li tegno,
o sia che sono in quel bel lume intenti.
Basta ch'io non so mai formar parola,
sí quel fatale e mio divino aspetto
la forza insieme e l'anima m'invola.
O mirabil d'Amore e raro effetto,
ch'una sol cosa, una bellezza sola
mi dia la vita, e tolga l'intelletto!

[When, by my rare good fortune on earth, I come into the presence of those beautiful, inspiring, and luminous eyes, style, tongue, ardor and wit, thoughts, conceits and feelings are all either suppressed or quenched, and I become as though mute and stupid—whether it be the reverence in which I hold them, or that they are fixed on such a beautiful light. It is enough that I do not know how to form words, so much does that fatal and to me divine sight carry off my strength and soul together. Oh miracle and rare effect of Love, that one and the same thing, one and the same beauty, should give life and take away the mind!]

“Such an unabashedly negative positioning of a woman in terms of her inability to articulate can be read as an ironic and conscious displacement of the male gaze, for the eloquence of her text contradicts this statement”¹⁸—but the scenario here is one worked out by male poets reacting to the female gaze:

Più volte già dal bel sembiante umano
ò preso ardir co le mie fide scorte
d'assalir con parole oneste accorte
la mia nemica in atto umile et piano.
Fanno poi gli occhi suoi mio penser vano
per ch'ogni mia fortuna, ogni mia sorte,
mio ben, mio male, et mia vita et mia morte
quei che solo il po far l'à posto in mano.
Ond'io non pote' mai formar parola
ch'altro che da me stesso fosse intesa,
così m'à fatto Amor tremante et fioco.
Et veggi' or ben che caritate accesa
lega la lingua altrui, gli spirti invola:
chi po dir com' egli arde à ‘n picciol foco.

(Petrarch, Canzoniere 170)

[Many times from her kind expression I have learned boldness, with my faithful guides, to assail with virtuous skillful words my enemy so humble and mild of bearing. But her eyes then make my thought vain, for Love, who alone can do so, has placed in her hands all my fortune, all my destiny, my good, my ill, my life, and my death. Wherefore I have never been able to form a word that was understood by any but myself, Love has made me so trembling and weak! And I see well how burning Love binds one's tongue, steals away one's breath: he who can say how he burns is in but a little fire.]¹⁹

The lover tongue-tied and worse in the presence of the beloved is an important figure over the whole course of the Petrarchan tradition, often serving the purpose that Schiesari interprets here as identifiably female: turning an apparent incapacity in courtship into evidence of a deeper kind of authority.²⁰ The general symptomology is even more tangled in its gender filiations; the most famous catalogue is by Catullus (51.9-12), at that point translating from one of the few surviving poems of Sappho.²¹

Schiesari wants to present Stampa as the voice of what has been called a “relational” (as opposed to “individualistic”) feminism;²² I think her haste in doing so is obvious:

The mourning for a lost object in her poetry may be at times an explicit reference to her lover. But it is a mourning not merely for a particular lost object, but also for the generalized loss of possibilities women suffer under patriarchal dominance. …²³

That “at times” is reckless understatement; the explicit references to the lover are too many to be worth counting. Against their weight Schiesari, taking some cues from Ann Rosalind Jones, wants to emphasize the “woman-to-woman solidarity” that Stampa establishes by inviting other victims of masculine cruelty “into a chorus of lament.”²⁴ This seems to be largely a generalization from a single poem (Rime 173). There is a valid point to be made about the comparative frequency of choral address in Stampa, which may indeed be a gender feature. Petrarch himself insisted on strong links between solitude and poetry (“Pochi compagni avrai” [You will have few companions], he tells the aspiring poet of Canzoniere 7), and only rarely does one of his poems speak to a group, while at least a dozen of Stampa's Rime d'amore may be said to do so.²⁵ Eight of these (if you count the mythological 23 and 173) are addressed specifically to groups of women. Yet if this is enough to inflect the whole, I do not see that it is enough to revolutionize it, especially in view of the style of women-to-woman solidarity sometimes expressed:

E spero ancor che debba dir qualcuna:
—Felicissima lei, da che sostenne
per sí chiara cagion danno sí chiaro!
Deh, perché tant' amor, tanta fortuna
per sí nobil signor a me non venne,
ch'anch'io n'andrei con tanta donna a paro?

(Rime 1.9-12)

[And I hope too that some woman might feel the need to say, “Most happy she, since she sustained such a noble loss for such a noble cause! Alas, why did such a love, such fortune not come to me through so noble a lord, that I could walk on a level with such a lady?”]

Her bad luck with this man may some day make women envy her—this from the programmatic opening sonnet, which begins her sequence with the same words as Petrarch's:

Voi, ch'ascoltate in queste meste rime,
in questi mesti, in questi oscuri accenti
il suon degli amorosi miei lamenti
e de le pene mie tra l'altre prime,
ove fia chi valor apprezzi e stime,
gloria, non che perdon, de' miei lamenti
spero trovar fra le ben nate genti,
poi che la lor cagione è sí sublime.

(Rime 1.1-8)

[You who hear in these mournful rhymes, in these mournful, in these dark accents, the sound of my amorous laments and of my sufferings greater than any others, where there is anyone who prizes and esteems valor, I hope to find glory, not only pardon, among well-born people, since their cause is so sublime.]

This second-person plural means, among others, us, the posthumous readership which is one of the major points of reference for Petrarchan literary ambition. Petrarch's characterization of that ambition is if anything the more modest; he only hopes to be read “ove sia chi per prova intenda amore” (Canzoniere 1.7 [where there is anyone who understands love through experience]), and does not surround that sympathetic reader with the language of aristocratic rank. But then his whole poem is, as Stampa's quite specifically is not, a poem of regret, a palinode:

Voi ch'ascoltate in rime sparse il suono
di quei sospiri ond'io nudriva ‘l core
in sul mio primo giovenile errore,
quand' era in parte altr' uom da quel ch' i' sono.

(Canzoniere 1.1-4)

[You who hear in scattered rhymes the sound of those sighs with which I nourished my heart during my first youthful error, when I was in part another man from what I am now.]

Stampa's rhymes are mournful but not scattered; she focuses with particular force on one of Petrarch's most quoted lines: “spero trovar pietà, non che perdono” (Canzoniere 1.8; [I hope to find pity, not only pardon]). Pietà deftly puts us in the position of Laura, and gives the solicitation of literary approval the same sorrowful tone as the attempt to seduce a virtuous woman. For Stampa, though, the literary future promises a victory over her melancholy past—or more accurately, is the means by which that past will be turned to stirring account, as the poetry she writes about it will bring her glory. At the end of her octave, where Petrarch has perdono, she puts sublime, a term of exhilaration that in fact never appears in his Canzoniere.

These changes can be read as initiating Stampa's critique of Petrarchism;²⁶ but if anything is being critiqued, it is Petrarch's diffidence about his own ambition. Stampa clears away a certain moral unease about the aspiration for literary immortality, in order to place that aspiration boldly at the head of her sequence. Do we need to take it as a critique? Why not testimony of the heart that Stampa takes from what Petrarch himself could not know, the astounding success he would have—partly by way of the invention that her own name uncannily identifies—at attaining the goal expressed in so muted a form in his opening poem? What he did she can do; precisely with his example before her, she can shed his hesitancy about its possibility and rightness.

Part of what she does, knowingly or not, is recover some of its past. The military tone to her praise is partly a consequence of writing about a male beloved who was both fictionally and biographically a soldier, but is also a restoration to such writing of the erotic idiom of Petrarch's own predecessors, the troubadours; “chi valor apprezzi” remembers the famous doublet pretz e valor. The troubadours made their mark by using the honorific terminology of a warrior aristocracy to talk about the experience of sexual desire; doing so, they made that experience not just a passion but, as it had never been before, a source of prestige. In real life Stampa's lover, Collaltino di Collalto, probably beckoned, especially from the perspective of her current residence, with the aura of an older style of feudal nobility; he was of “un sangue illustre, agli alti re vicino” (Rime 6.5 [illustrious blood, near to lofty kings]), one of the established terraferma aristocracy whose nominal allegiance to Venice never seemed to foreclose the reassertion of their baronial autonomy (he was eventually banished from Venetian territory for his use of a private army). Stampa usually calls him “conte,” a term answerable to the Petrarchan “donna” but even clearer in its affirmation of rank; Collalto, his hereditary estate on the Piave, is often in her poems, lightly pastoralized as some variation of “l'alto colle.” Part of the work of her poetry is, as in Occitan lyric, appropriating to herself something of the standing of her object: “l'alto colle e vago, / ove nacque il famoso ed alto fago, / de le cui fronde alto disio m'accendi” (Rime 139.2-4 [lofty and beautiful hill, where rises the famous and lofty beech tree, for whose leaves you fire my lofty desire]). Petrarch's epochal contribution here had been a literary dimension, centering everything on the Laura/laurel nexus by which the woman whom he desires is simultaneously the classical honor given to victorious generals and to poets; Stampa has no trouble finding an equivalent:

Alto colle, gradito e grazioso,
novo Parnasso mio, novo Elicona,
ove poggiando attendo la corona,
de le fatiche mie dolce riposo.

(Rime 10.1-4)

[Lofty hill, welcome and gracious, my new Parnassus, new Helicon, where returning to harbor I wait for the crown, sweet repose from my labors.]

Her lover's social eminence and the literary recognition for which she waits are of a piece and very much of their age; “colle gentil,” the poem ends, “dignissimo d'impero” [noble hill, most worthy of empire], dovetailing with a key description of Laura: “Alma real dignissima d'impero” (Canzoniere 267.7 [regal soul, most worthy of empire]).

The Petrarchan grid against which Stampa structures her sequence is more specific than that of many male Petrarchists. If Petrarch's enamorment with Laura occurred during Holy Week, on the anniversary of the crucifixion, in a year that he tells us elsewhere was 1327, Stampa's love for Collaltino began on Christmas, in a year that we can deduce was 1548. We learn this in Rime 2, which effectively conflates Canzoniere 3 and 4 in making her lover's entry into her heart a figure of the Incarnation; it is also the first in another Petrarchan series, the anniversary poems (Rime 155 and 209) that allow us to keep track of fictional time (the story runs just over three years). The general wash of oxymoronic rhetoric is also in evidence; again, when a contrast with Petrarchan usage is in order, it is apt to show Stampa's superior comfort with that rhetoric:

non mi pento, anzi glorio e gioisco;
e, se donna giamai gradí, gradisco
questa fiamma amorosa e questo gelo.

(Rime 155.6-8)

[I do not repent, but glory and rejoice; and if no woman ever welcomed it before, I welcome this amorous flame and this ice.]

In descriptions of the beloved, we see less than we do in male Petrarchists of the style of bejeweled fragmentation that figures so strongly in Petrarchism's reputation, and in particular is Vickers's starting point. It can turn up, though—“Entro i begli occhi, entro l'avorio e l'ostro, / ove Amor tien sua gloriosa insegna” (Rime 117.5-6 [Amid the beautiful eyes, amid the ivory and the purple, where Love holds his glorious banner])²⁷—and Stampa is prompt enough in fixing her beloved in a female gaze of idealizing desire:

Chi vuol conoscer, donne, il mio signore,
miri un signor di vago e dolce aspetto,
giovane d'anni e vecchio d'intelletto,
imagin de la gloria e del valore:
di pelo biondo, e di vivo colore,
di persona alta e spazioso petto,
e finalmente in ogni opra perfetto …

(Rime 7.1-7)

[Who wishes to know my lord, ladies, gaze upon a lord with a beautiful and sweet expression, young in years and old in understanding, the image of glory and of valor: with blond hair and lively color, of tall stature and large chest, and finally perfect in all things …]

The build is masculine, though it is impossible not to notice that he shares Laura's hair color.

There is one more line in the octave here: “fuor ch'un poco (oimè lassa!) empio in amore” (except a little, oh alas! pitiless in love). Jones writes in this connection of how a “reversal of traditionally gendered qualities occurs especially vividly in the blason poems throughout Stampa's collection, in which she shifts from admiration for the count's valor to a critique of his ferocity”²⁸—though that is a slightly misleading way to put it, since Stampa effects that reversal by being poetically conservative. She reproaches her beloved in the terms in which male Petrarchists traditionally reproach theirs: “Faire is my love, and cruell as sh'is faire” (Samuel Daniel, Delia 6.1). The religious overtones of empio—“impious” as well as “pitiless”—give her reproach a special shading (she turns it against herself in her religious poetry, e.g., Rime 310.1), but the root sense is straightforwardly conventional: her beloved does not show her pietà. The later “counter-blason” that Jones cites is even more familiar in its idiom: “Una inaudita e nova crudeltate …” (Rime 174.1 [An unheard of and novel crueltyl]). Cruelty here is a blankness of response—“un non dar giamai cibo a la speranza” (174.11 [never giving food to hope])—to what for the lover is the overwhelming experience of desire; that lack of reciprocity is the most familiar situation in Petrarchism,²⁹ and does not frustrate its underlying enterprise. Even to long for so elevated an object is to be raised:

E ne' miei danni ho pur questo contento,
ch'almen, s'io fui da te sí mal trattata,
alta fu la cagion del mio tormento.

(Rime 87.12-14)

[And in my injuries I still have this contentment, that even though I was so badly treated by you, the cause of my torment was lofty.]

Indeed, Stampa writes elsewhere, in lines Burckhardt would have done well to quote, it is precisely “l'istoria de le mie gioiose pene, / che mi fan singolar fra l'altra gente” (Rime 114.10-11 [the story of my joyous pain, which makes me singular among other people]—the last locution taken from Canzoniere 292.4); and in one extraordinary poem she makes precisely her frustration the means by which she not only assimilates but outdoes the virtues of her beloved:

Novo e raro miracol di natura,
ma non novo né raro a quel signore,
che ‘l mondo tutto va chiamando Amore,
che ‘l tutto adopra fuor d’ ogni misura:
il valor, che degli altri il pregio fura,
del mio signor, che vince ogni valore,
è vinto, lassa, sol dal mio dolore,
dolor, a petto a cui null'altro dura.
Quant'ei tutt'altri cavalieri eccede
in esser bello, nobile ed ardito,
tanto è vinto da me, da la mia fede.
Miracol fuor d'amor mai non udito!
Dolor, che chi nol prova non lo crede!
Lassa, ch'io sola vinco l'infinito!

(Rime 91)

[New and rare miracle of nature, but not new or rare to that lord whom all the world calls upon as Love, who works all things beyond all measure: the valor, which steals the prize from all others, of my lord, who surpasses all valor, is conquered, alas, only by my pain, pain which endures in no other breast. As much as he exceeds all other knights in being beautiful, noble, and passionate, so much is he conquered by me, by my faith. Miracle never heard of apart from love! Pain which no one who does not suffer it can believe! Alas, that I alone conquer the infinite!]

Stampa's readership has not been large, but my guess is that this is the note of hers—“titanic” is Eugenio Donadoni's word for that last line³⁰—most likely to lodge in the memory. Rilke, her most famous advocate, calls her one of

those powerful examples of women in love … who, even while they called him, surpassed the man they loved; who grew above him and beyond him when he didn't return … who didn't cease until their torment suddenly turned into a bitter, icy magnificence, which nothing could confine³¹

—less an outsider's evaluation than a restatement of the self-consciousness in Rime 91. Stampa has been cited as an example of “humility and idealizing seriousness” in contrast to the “narcissism and calculating rhetoric” of specifically male literati,³² but she makes one of her most important poetic marks with a hyperbolic appropriation of male aggression in some of its most imperious forms; she sounds like Prince Hal justifying himself to his father: “Percy is but my factor, good my Lord, / To engrosse up glorious deeds on my behalfe” (1 Henry IV 3.2.147-48). Unlike Hal, of course, she is not quite answering her adversary in kind; her leverage comes in shifting the contest from military achievement to subjective experience, indeed replacing public endeavor with what by the end is proclaimed as a cosmic subjectivity. Such a move is one of the abiding innuendos of male Petrarchism, latent in the symbolism of the laurel, but usually made explicit only at the edges of the tradition:

Sleep ye dull Caesars, Rome will boast in vain
Your glorious Tryumphs, One is in my brain,
Great as all yours, and circled with thy Bayes,
My thoughts take Empire o're all land and seas.(33)

Stampa's boast rises from the very center of the Petrarchan love story.

It is, of course, a boast with lassa in it, nor does it have the conclusiveness that late placement in the sequence might give it; but tradition also offers Stampa gentler and steadier forms of recuperation:

l'imagin del sembiante vostro vero
mi sta sempre nel cor fissa e scolpita,
qual donna in parte, ove sia più gradita
che gemme oriental, oro od impero.

(Rime. 1625-8)

[the image of your true semblance stands forever fixed and sculpted in my heart like a lady in a place where she would be more welcome than oriental gems, gold, or empire.]

Collaltino's image is feminized, in part, because donna is so ready a term for dramatizing the authority of a picture in the heart; that is the characteristic way in which the otherwise unattainable Petrarchan lady can be and is possessed by her lover: “'l bel viso leggiadro che depinto / porto nel petto et veggio ove ch'io miri” (Canzoniere 96.5-6 [that lovely smiling face, which I carry painted in my breast and see wherever I look]). It is a possession both prompted and enabled by the absence of the beloved, which gives imagination its task and opportunity and is one of the central occasions of Petrarchan poetry.³⁴ Giordano Bruno, in his philosophical reconfiguration of Petrarchism, calls love the power that “Fa presente d'absenti effigie vere” (makes present true effigies of the absent),³⁵ even more orthodox attempts to interpret Petrarchan love in normative terms make much of the lover's capacity for image-making as a pragmatic resource that is also the key to spiritual enlightenment:

the lover who considers beauty only in the body loses this good and this happiness as soon as his beloved lady, by her absence, leaves his eyes deprived of their splendor, and consequently leaves his soul widowed of its good. … Hence, to escape the torment of this absence and to enjoy beauty without suffering, the Courtier, aided by reason, must turn his desire entirely away from the body and to beauty alone, contemplate it in its simple and pure self, in so far as he is able, and in his imagination give it a shape distinct from all matter; and thus make it loving and dear to his soul, and there enjoy it; and let him keep it with him day and night, in every time and place, without fear of ever losing it.³⁶

Collaltino's absence is a given for most of the length of the Rime d'amore, with more than usual decisiveness: he is away at war, in service to the King of France. His failure to answer her letters and poems is the main mistreatment of which Stampa complains:

E sí l' assenzia e ‘l poco amor v'invola
la memoria di lei, la vostra fede,
che pur non le scrivete una parola.

(Rime 82.9-11)

[And absence and the smallness of your love so steal away the memory of her, of your own faith, that you have not even written a word.]

The silence summons jealousy and fear, but also the other kind of imagining:

Voi potete, signor, ben tôrmi voi
con quel cor d'indurato diamante,
e farvi d'altra donna novo amante:
di che cosa non è, che piú m'annoi;
ma non potete giá ritôrmi poi
l'imagin vostra, il vostro almo sembiante,
che giorno e notte mi sta sempre innante,
poi che mi fece Amor de' servi suoi.

(Rime 171.1-8)

[You can, lord, take yourself from me with that heart of hardened diamond, and become the new lover of another woman—there is nothing that would hurt me more—but you cannot ever take back your image, your divine appearance, which stands before me always day and night since love made me one of his slaves.]

And over the course of the sequence, such affirmations become more empathetic and closer to theory:

Canta tu, musa mia, non piú quel volto,
non piú quegli occhi e quell'alme bellezze,
che ‘l senso mal accorto par che prezze,
in quest' ombre terrene impresso e involto;
ma l'alto senno in saggio petto accolto,
mille tesori e mille altre vaghezze
del conte mio, e tante sue grandezze,
ond' oggi il pregio a tutti gli altri ha tolto.
Or sará il tuo Castalio e ‘l tuo Parnaso
non fumo ed ombra, ma leggiadra schiera
di virtú vere, chiuse in nobil vaso.
Quest'è via da salir a gloria vera,
questo può farti da l'orto a l'occaso
e di verace onor chiara ed altera.

(Rime 206)

[Sing, my muse, no longer of that face, no longer of those eyes and those divine beauties which sense, falsely clever, stamped and wrapped into this earthly shade, appears to prize; but the lofty intelligence gathered in a wise breast, the thousand treasures and thousand other charms of my count, and his so many greatnesses, for which he has today taken the prize from all others. Now your Castalia and your Parnassus will be not smoke and shadow, but the graceful company of true virtues enclosed in a noble vase. This is the way to go to true glory, this can make you illustrious and proud with genuine honor from the rising to the setting of the sun.]

Which is virtually the last sonnet about Collaltino;³⁷ a modern reader is almost halfway through it before realizing that Stampa's count is not being forgotten but being translated. Stampa's Trauerwerk is one of successful, indeed triumphant abstraction.

That feeling of triumph, both in individual poems and in the overall design of the Rime d'amore, is an element of Stampa's writing that feminist critics have rightly emphasized; but I also think it takes a largely preemptive identification of Petrarchism with patriarchy in its oppressive mode not to recognize the role of Petrarchan convention in fueling her sense of victory. Stampa's case indeed seems to me to show how comparatively ungendered, in potential if not in practice, the expressive resources of Petrarchism were, how readily useful they were for female self-fashioning. Yet in another regard her case does define, more clearly and simply than any other woman poet I know—so simply that it has tended to escape notice—the difference between male and female Petrarchism. For the Petrarchan voice of which she so easily avails herself speaks from a situation that is in important ways the symmetrical opposite of the situation of a male lover speaking the same words.

The man longs for a woman he will never have. The troubadours usually sang of frustrated desire, but Petrarch's hyperbolic prolongation of that state—his unrequited longing for Laura lasted, by his own account, twenty-one years—is one of his special marks on the tradition he inherited. Petrarchism had a reputation for lasciviousness, and the record does often show it being used to successfully seductive purposes—in Bembo's own correspondence, for instance—but within the context implied by the poems themselves sexual love is almost always something yet to happen. We know, accordingly, that we are on unusual ground when we come upon Stampa's (not quite) morning-after poem:

O notte, a me piú chiara e piú beata
che i piú beati giorni ed i piú chiari,
notte degna da' primi e da' piú rari
ingegni esser, non pur da me, lodata;
tu de le gioie mie sola sei stata
fida ministra; tu tutti gli amari
de la mia vita hai fatto dolci e cari,
resomi in braccio lui che m'ha legata.
Sol mi mancò che non divenni allora
la fortunata Alcmena, a cui sté tanto
piú de l'usato a ritornar l'aurora.
Pur cosí bene io non potrò mai tanto
dir di te, notte candida, ch'ancora
da la materia non sia vinto il canto.

(Rime 104)

[Oh night, more clear to me and more blessed than the most blessed and clearest days, night worthy of being praised by the foremost and rarest talents, not just by me; you are the sole faithful minister of my joys; you have made all the bitter things of my life sweet and dear, having returned to my arms him who has bound me. All that was lacking for me was to become the fortunate Alcmena, for whom dawn waited so much longer than usual to return. Only I will never be able to speak well enough of you, pure night, that the song would not still be overwhelmed by its subject.]

Stampa's first tercet probably remembers two famous stanzas about an endless night with Laura (Canzoniere 22.31-36, 237.31-36)—passages in which the sexuality of Petrarch's own desire becomes, for him, unusually overt—but Petrarch is writing subjunctively of a pleasure that he elsewhere knows will never happen. The pleasure Stampa would prolong is an achieved fact, its aura still with her. It is not even the first time; passing references earlier—“le notti mie colme di gioia” (Rime 83.1 [the nights that were my summits of joy])—give us to understand that the affair with Collaltino has been sexually enacted more or less from the start, with no particular poem announcing its consummation. Rime 104 turns out to be part of a brief episode in which a visit from her lover allows her to think for a while that their liaison has been reestablished, but the direction of things has not changed. Her frustration characteristically looks backward, toward “la memoria ardente / del diletto provato, c'han disperso” (Rime 171.13-14 [the ardent memory of a known delight that has dispersed]), rather than forward; her Petrarchan voice speaks from a narrative that begins on the other side of that point which Petrarch's own story never reaches.

There is, it seems to me, a strong logic by which Stampa's situation may be called the real position of strength that Petrarchism would provide for a woman's voice. There are comparably forceful and obvious reasons that more women, even those with well nurtured poetic skills, would not adopt it; it is the role of la traviata (no less a figure than Croce calls Stampa that, though he puts it in quotation marks),³⁸ the fallen woman, censurable in itself, and a confirmation of the sexual taint that female literary activity of any sort carried in some quarters. Most female Petrarchans seem to make a point of writing largely in the Neoplatonic and devotional strains of the tradition, keeping expressions of the lower eros within bounds. Vittoria Colonna earns her special eminence with poetry of lament for her dead husband, to tell a love story that in effect begins two-thirds of the way through Petrarch's story, precisely where earthly prospects end, even as her grief itself can claim the un-Petrarchan sanction of marriage. The most interesting attempt to fit the poetry of courtship to such standards is perhaps the Charite and Sincero sequence of Catherine des Roches, a male-female dialogue—an almost unique case where both parties speak—in the course of which the man is educated in the practice of virtuous desire.³⁹ We can gauge what such writers had to fear from the posthumous abuse, heavy with sexual insult, that Stampa received and may have played its role in denying her, at least in her own age, the poetic fame which she sounded so confident would be hers.⁴⁰

Stampa may in fact have been a professional courtesan, as her fellow poets Tullia d'Aragona and Veronica Franco indisputably were; it is imaginable that the liaison with Collaltino was a business arrangement that became, at least for her, something more intense (a common understanding sees a similar pattern in Shakespeare's sonnets to his young man). The evidence, however, is circumstantial and inconclusive; there are in any case reasons to think that in the matter of female sexual options Venice offered more of a continuum between the poles of whoredom and chastity than we usually meet with in the age. The only trattato d'amore to treat both exclusively and unscornfully of sexual love, Francesco Sansovino's Ragionamento (1545), is Venetian and indeed dedicated to Stampa, then in her early twenties;⁴¹ it depicts a world of erotic possibility that is illicit but not mercenary, self-consciously refined in its manners and, by example and implication, deserving of dignified literary treatment. The author tells his dedicatee he is writing to warn her about the ways of men, but a young woman reading the work itself might well come to think that the poetry of sexual love could win her respect and fame. By whatever inducements, Stampa almost uniquely makes her way to the key discovery: that on her side of the gender line consummated desire is the beginning of lyric empowerment. It is the discovery of how the next chapter of the Petrarchan story goes.

Think of it this way. The silence of the usual Petrarchan lady is partly just a formal donnée (the beloved in almost any type of love poetry, after all, seldom gets a chance to say much), partly a synonym for No; the poetry, the elaborated, ramifying self-consciousness of her lover, is a reflex from that No, and enough of a reward that impatient readers not uncommonly suspect the male Petrarchan of somehow conniving in his own frustration. The lady's No could itself be male ventriloquism: “because of ignorance and some sort of stupid timidity there are men who miss many a good opportunity in love. Then they attribute their failures to their lady's virtue, even though they never get anywhere near testing it.”⁴² Suppose the man got what he said he wanted; might he then have nothing to say? Stampa's sequence dramatizes that possibility. As it happens, we know that Collaltino was a poet of sorts, the author of eleven surviving sonnets—several of them poems of Petrarchan complaint and supplication, none of them looking as if they have to do with Stampa.⁴³ To her he is, within and outside her poetry, silent, and she spends most of her sequence parsing that silence. She has become the one with something, everything, to say. Sexual love, at least in this context, is the vanishing point between female and male silence.

That is to be rather schematic with one example, though it is a way of explaining that example's power. We can, however, adduce authoritative precedent—not, in this case, from a female writer, but from Petrarch's own first imitator.⁴⁴ Boccaccio seems to have been writing under strong Petrarchan influence as early as the 1330s, before the two met and became friends; among the products of this influence are love sonnets about a woman he calls Fiammetta. The story that those sonnets appear to tell takes some un-Petrarchan turns when this lover successfully seduces his lady, is introduced to “la letizia de'beati” (Rime 59.14 [the happiness of the blessed]), only to have her betray him with other men. But the sequence that tells that story is a spotty construct of later editors; Boccaccio himself destroyed many of his lyric poems, never collected or ordered the survivors, and seemed to know that it was not as a poet that he was going to find his niche. Elements of the Fiammetta story, however, keep turning up in odd corners of the prose, notably in the Filocolo and the Ameto (a sixteenth-century edition of which was dedicated to Stampa), with a persistence that suggests both autobiographical grounding and artistic experimentation with promising material in search of its right form. By general consent, Boccaccio finds that form when he changes point of view to write his Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta (1343-44) in the woman's voice. Now it is the story of a young married woman who is seduced by an ardent young man whom she meets in church; the sexual experience is intense—“he … taught me to prize concealed delights as much as the treasures hidden inside the earth”⁴⁵—but her lover soon tells her he must go to Naples to tend on his aging father and, to make a long story short, is never heard from again. Most of the work—it has been called “the first modern psychological and realistic novel”⁴⁶—is simply the voice of her alternating hope and depression as she comes to realize that she has been abandoned. The only real motivation left her by the end is literary, the composition of the book we are reading; the last chapter imagines its possible audience.

If Stampa needed some literary paradigm for the story surrounding her poems, this one was readily to hand; we may describe her Rime d'amore as a lyricization of Boccaccio's prose Elegia into a more affirmative mode. In the bargain, she gives the story a different ending. Some more decisive conclusion to Fiammetta's narrative had been a felt need. A Spaniard named Juan de Flores published a sequel in 1495 in which Fiammetta finally confronts her lover, but to no happy effect. She soon dies; he takes a vow of, yes, silence and goes to live in the wilderness (to be joined eventually by the male narrator). A French translation, Déplourable fin de Flamecte, was Maurice Scève's first literary work (1535).⁴⁷ The last fifteen poems of Stampa's Rime d'amore, in contrast, concern a new love—Bartholomeo Zen, evidently a young Venetian of rank, his name recoverable from an acrostic (partly obscured in modernized spelling)—who gradually but it seems effectively replaces the old: “Un foco eguale al primo foco io sento” (Rime 221.9 [I feel a fire equal to the first fire]). Stampa thinks this will be happier, but not with any surety:

                                        io temo non pian piano
cada nel mar del pianto, ov'era pria,
la vita mia; e prego Dio che ‘nvano.

(Rime 213.11-14)

[I fear, not at all gently, that my life may fall into the sea of weeping where it was before; and I pray God I fear in vain.]

Yet precisely in her fears she recognizes a sense of purpose and identity:

Ma che poss'io, se m'è l'arder fatale,
se volontariamente andar consento
d'un foco in altro, e d'un in altro male?

(Rime 221.11-14)

[But what could I do, if my passion is fated, if I voluntarily consent to go from one fire to another, from one ill to another?]

She likens herself to the salamander—“Amor m'ha fatto tal ch'io vivo in foco” (Rime 208.1 [Love has made me so that I live in fire])—a comparison probably more famous here than in the Petrarchan context from which she took it (Canzoniere 207.40-41). In Stampa's sequence the metaphor becomes more directly sensual, indeed suggests something like addiction to the physical pleasure of it—though another trope makes clear what else is at stake:

Che farai, alma? ove volgerai il piede?
qual sentier prenderai, che piú ti vaglia?
Tornerai a seguir Amor, che smaglia
ogni lorica, quando irato fiede?
o, stanca e sazia de le tante prede
fatte di te ne l'aspra sua battaglia,
t'armerai sí che, perch'ei pur t'assaglia,
non ti vincerá piú qual suole e crede?
Il ritrarsi è sicuro, e ‘l contrastare
è glorioso; e l'ésca, che ci mostra,
è tal, che può nocendo anco giovare.
Non perde e non vince anco uom che non giostra:
in queste imprese perigliose e rare
si potria far maggior la gloria nostra.

(Rime 212)

[What will you do, soul? where will you turn your foot? what path will you choose as more worthy of you? Will you turn to follow Love, who loosens all breast armor when he strikes in anger? or, weary and exhausted from so much plunder taken from you in his harsh battle, will you arm yourself so that when he assails you he will no longer conquer you as he is used to doing and believes he can do? Retreat is safe, and making a stand is glorious; and the outcome which shows itself is such that it can please even as it harms. That man does not die and also does not conquer who does not enter the lists: in these dangerous and rare enterprises one can make our glory greater.]

Loving again, successfully, is not one of the things expected of Petrarchan poets, though they tend to have interesting things to say when they do. Wyatt and Ronsard provide famous examples, but Stampa's case has a special clarity. Constancy in the object of desire is one of the tradition's reigning fictions, but it is not an indispensable one; the constancy that counts is in the subject, in the agency of desire itself. Stampa's new start brings forth an affirmation of her own heroic consistency. Knowing that she does not know what comes next, she unfurls afresh the bold ambition of her opening poem: “gloria, non che perdono.”

Notes

1. The second edition, Catalogue of the Petrarch Collection in Cornell University Library, introduced by Morris Bishop, indexed by Laura Jennings (Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson, 1974), is more complete, but it sacrifices many of Mary Fowler's annotations from the first edition, which is still useful to have around: Catalogue of the Petrarch Collection Bequeathed by Willard Fiske (London: Oxford UP, 1916).

2. John Freccero, “The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch's Poetics,” Diacritics 5 (1975): 34-40; Nancy Vickers, “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme,” Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982), 95-109. For my own understanding of the tradition (though with different emphases from the ones I give here), see Gordon Braden, “Love and Fame: The Petrarchan Career,” Pragmatism's Freud: The Moral Disposition of Psychoanalysis, ed. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986), 126-58.

3. Vickers, 108-109.

4. Vickers, 107.

5. Gary F. Waller, “Struggling into Discourse: The Emergence of Renaissance Women's Writing,” Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, ed. Margaret Patterson Hannay (Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1985), 250.

6. Waller, 242.

7. A pleasant conceited comedie, wherein is shewed how a man may chuse a good wife from a bad (London, 1620; STC 5594), sig. B3^v (probably by Thomas Heywood); there is an extended development of the topic in Satyre VIII (“Inamorato Curio”) of John Marston's The Scourge of Villanie (1599). See Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620 (Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 1984), 184-89.

8. From the dedication to the Duchess of Somma prefaced to Book 2 of Las obras de Boscán y algunas de Garcilasso de la Vega (1543), trans. David H. Darst in his Juan Boscán (Boston: Twayne, 1978), 133-34.

9. Pietro Bembo's Gli Asolani, trans. Rudolf B. Gottfried (1954; rpt. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries, 1971) 148 (from the opening of Book 3).

10. Maria Savorgnan and Pietro Bembo, Carteggio d'Amore (1500-1501), ed. Carlo Dionisotti (Florence: Le Monnier, 1950); see also my “Applied Petrarchism: The Loves of Pietro Bembo,” forthcoming in Modern Language Quarterly.

11. Vittoria Colonna, 1538 (with numerous subsequent editions); Tullia d'Aragona, 1547 (second edition 1549); Laura Terracina, 1548 (with numerous subsequent editions); Chiara Matraini, 1555 (Lucca); Laura Battiferri, 1560 (Florence); Veronica Franco, 1575. For an inclusive bibliography of publications by women writers during the Italian Renaissance (up to the mid-seventeenth century), see Marina Zancan, ed., Nel cerchio della luna: figure di donna in alcuni testi del xvi secolo (Venice: Marsilio, 1983), 254-64; on the Venetian ambience, with some remarks particularly relevant to my discussion here, see Zancan's “L'intellettualità feminile nel primo Cinquecento: Maria Savorgnan e Gaspara Stampa,” Annali d'Italianistica 7 (1989): 42-65.

12. Rime diverse di molti eccelentiss. autori nuovamente raccolte, 9 vols. (Venice et aliter, 1545-1560); the publication history is quite complicated, and the titles of individual volumes vary. Vol. 6 is the fullest in the coverage of women, with twenty-eight poems by nine female poets (including Gaspara Stampa); vols. 5 and 7 print for the first time the thirteen surviving poems of Isabella di Morra and are still our authority for their text. I am indebted to Margie Burns for some research on this point.

13. Lodovico Domenichi, ed., Rime diverse d'alcune nobilissime e virtuosissime donne (Lucca, 1559); Domenichi also includes thirteen poems written by men in response to particular poems by the anthologized women. On the contents of this collection, see Marie-Françoise Piéjus, “La Première Anthologie de poèmes féminins: l'écriture filtrée et orientée,” Le Pouvoir et la plume: incitation, contrôle et répression dans l'Italie du xvi^e siècle (Paris: Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1982), 193-213.

14. See, for example, Giacomo Filippo Tomasini, Franciscus Petrarcha rediui[u]us una cum Laurae amasiae suae uita (Padua, 1630), 120-24; Giovanni Andrea Gilio da Fabriano, Topica poetica (Venice, 1580) 75-77 (ten sonnets). Gilio admits in his preface that the poems he provides do not have “quella perfezzione e vaghezza” that poems by some contemporary women do. The women named as Petrarch's contemporaries appear to have been real and, of course, may indeed have written poems, but the ones published in their names are in most cases obvious cinquecento forgeries. See Pasquale Stoppelli on “Lagia Chiavelli” (one of the women in question) in Dizionario biografico degli italiani (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1960-) 42: 641-42.

15. Jehan de Nostredame, Les Vies des plus célèbres et anciens poètes provençaux, ed. Camille Chabaneau (Paris: Champion, 1913), 129-32.

16. I am actually interested primarily in the sonnet sequence (including a canzone and two sestine) constituted by poems 1-121 in Abdelkader Salza's edition, from which I take my quotations: Gaspara Stampa and Veronica Franco, Rime (Bari: Laterza, 1913). This sequence is taken substantially intact from the 1554 volume, and it shows clear signs of authoria design; Salza's few changes in its ordering seem to me reasonable if not always necessary (on one of them, see note 37 below). Elsewhere Salza rearranged more aggressively, mostly with a view to giving the whole volume—Rime d'amore and Rime varie—a strong penitential conclusion. Contemporary critics are generally (I think rightly) unconvinced, though his numeration has become standard.

    Salza's text of Stampa's Rime has been reprinted with a good introduction by Maria Bellonci and helpful notes by Rodolpho Ceriello (Milan: Rizzoli, 1976); a bilingual Selected Poems, ed. and trans. Laura Anna Stortoni and Mary Prentice Lillie (New York: Italica Press, 1994), covers about a third of the corpus. For a comprehensive English-language discussion of the poet and her works, see Fiora A. Bassanese, Gaspara Stampa (Boston: Twayne, 1982); on her Petrarchism, in addition to the other works I cite, see Luigi Russo's rather diffuse “Gaspara Stampa e il petrarchismo del '500,” Belfagor 13 (1958): 1-20, and, in a more sophisticated mode, Luciana Borsetto, “Narciso ed Eco. Figura e scrittura nella lirica femminile del cinquecento,” Del cerchio della luna, 212-33.

17. Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1992), 169.

18. Schiesari, 170.

19. Here and below, I take my text and (with some minor changes) translation for Petrarch from Robert M. Durling, ed. and trans., Petrarch's Lyric Poems (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1976).

20. For example, “Dumbe Swannes, not chatring Pies, do Lovers prove, / They love indeed, who quake to say they love”; Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella 54.13-14. Stampa herself essays the topic again in Rime 187. See my “Unspeakable Love: Petrarch to Herbert,” Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990), 253-72. As I write this, country radio stations are playing Vince Gill's “Whenever You Come Around,” a reminder of the theme's durability.

21. A connection, as it happens, first noted (by Marc Antoine Muret) in a commentary published in Stampa's adopted city of Venice in the year of her death; see Julia Haig Gaisser, Catullus and His Renaissance Readers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 163-65.

22. Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990), 7-8; following Karen Offen.

23. Schiesari, 169.

24. Ann Rosalind Jones, “New Songs for the Swallow: Ovid's Philomela in Tullia d'Aragona and Gaspara Stampa,” Refiguring Women: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance, ed. Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1991), 272, 271; quoted by Schiesari, Gendering 168, with “chorus” in italics.

25. My count (excluding metaphorical apostrophes to eyes, rivers, etc., which are common in both poets): Petrarch 1, 92 (“donne”), 139, 161; Stampa 1, 7, 15, 23, 24, 55, 64, 86, 90, 151 (based on Petrarch 92), 173, 226, 241 (with 7, 64, 86, 90, 151, 241 addressed specifically to “donne”). In 7 Stampa imitates Petrarch 248 (“Chi vuol veder”) but pluralizes the vocative (“Chi vuol conoscer, donne”); in 121, however, she uses Petrarch's construction without change. Most uses of “voi” in fact refer to Collaltino; Petrarch addresses Laura this way, and Stampa is also following his lead in reserving “tu” for Amor himself.

26. For example, Patricia Philippy, “Gaspara Stampa's Rime: Replication and Retraction,” Philological Quarterly 68 (1989), 1-23.

27. As a color, ostro in this context means something close to scarlet; it is used, for example, to describe a Cardinal's robes, and it is conventional in Petrarchism—though not in Petrarch himself—for the lips: e.g., “l'ostro e le perle, che con tanto odore / movean leggiadre parolette” (Trissino, Rime 10.5-6). I translate “purple” to keep visible the strong overtone of aristocratic rank. Collaltino's mouth is like the stripe on a senator's toga.

28. Ann Rosalind Jones, The Currency of Eros: Women's Love Lyric in Europe, 1540-1620 (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990), 135.

29. At one point Stampa indicates that she is also the immovable object in someone else's story: “Odio chi m'ma, ed amo chi mi sprezza” (Rime 43.5 [I hate the one who loves me, and love the one who scorns me]). Petrarchan frustration is, as it were, part of the very structure of erotic reality.

30. Eugenio Donadoni, Gaspara Stampa (Messina: Principato, 1919), 58. His point is that the line jumps several centuries of literary history and sounds more like something “di ieri e di oggi” than something from the cinquecento.

31. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1990), 134. She is cited again on page 236 and in the first Duino Elegy. In an odd passage, Jones chides Rilke for a “suspiciously easy” act of cross-gendered identification, but then agrees with what he has to say (Currency 137).

32. Jones, Currency, 7.

33. James Shirley, “To L. for a wreath of Bayes sent,” Poems & c. (London, 1646; Wing S3481), 11.

34. Petrarch's own usual term is lontonanza; he almost, but not quite, uses the Derridean term when he writes of Laura's ability “addolcir l'assenzio” (Canzoniere 215.14), to sweeten wormwood (absinthe). Assenzio is in Stampa's copia uerborum (Rime 68.33), but like many Petrarchists not bound to Bembian strictures she also makes free use of assenzia and related forms (66.10, 70.13, 71.8, 76.2, 80.5, 82.9, 99.8, 105.7, 175.8, 190.8, 195.13, 214.2). Rime 175 contains a modest instance of the absent/present rhetoric that Bruno uses and Philip Sidney will make famous: “O absent presence Stella is not here” (Astrophil and Stella 106.1).

35. The sixth line of a sonnet that Bruno prefaced to De la causa, principio et uno (1584), and then inserted, with some textual variations, into the main text of De gli eroici furori (1585); see his Dialoghi italiani, ed. Giovanni Gentile, rev. Giovanni Aquilecchia (Florence: Sansoni, 1972), 189, 970.

36. Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Charles Singleton (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), 351 (4.66).

37. In the 1554 edition it is in fact the last, coming well after the other love poems; it rounds off a group of three that Salza moves up into the Rime d'amore to provide closure before the appearance of Bartholomeo Zen. So placed, they do not forestall some modest relapses, notably Rime 214.

38. Benedetto Croce, Conversazioni critiche (Bari: Laterza, 1932-1942) 2: 230.

39. Discussed by Jones in Currency 63-76. The texts are now available in Madeleine des Roches and Catherine des Roches, Les Oeuvres, ed. Anne R. Larsen (Geneva: Droz, 1993), 251-88.

40. See the savage sonnet, an “epitaffo infamante,” reprinted in Salza's edition, 196. Four words are represented only by their first letters. According to the manuscript in which the poem is preserved, there were originally twenty others to the same effect.

41. Ragionamento di messer Francesco Sansovino nel quale brevemente s'insegna a'giovani uomini la bella arte d'amore, in Trattati d'Amore del Cinquecento, ed. Giuseppe Zonta (Bari: Laterza, 1967), 151-84. There is a brief English summary in John Charles Nelson, Renaissance Theory of Love (New York: Columbia UP, 1958), 121-22.

42. Marguerite de Navarre, The Heptameron, trans. P. A. Chilton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 119 (from the tailpiece to Book 1, Story 9).

43. Salza prints them in an appendix, 215-20.

44. See Janet Levarie Smarr, Boccaccio and Fiammetta: The Narrator as Lover (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1986). It is likely that Ovid's Heroides also figures; see Phillippy, “Gaspara Stampa's Rime” (note 26 above) and “‘Altera Dido’: The Model of Ovid's Heroides in the Poems of Gaspara Stampa and Veronica Franco,” Italica 69 (1992), 1-18. For a larger sense of the tradition here, see Lawrence Lipking, Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988), who goes so far as to suggest “that the abandoned woman is also the archetypal poet” (23; on Stampa, see 170-81).

45. Boccaccio, The Elegy of Lady Fiammetta, trans. Mariangela Causa-Steindler and Thomas Mauch (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990), 26.

46. Vittore Branca, Boccaccio: The Man and His Works, trans. Richard Monges (New York: New York UP, 1976), 68.

47. See V. L. Saulnier, Maurice Scève (Paris: Klincksieck, 1948-1949), 1: 49-71 (including a chapter-by-chapter summary of the work); also Marina Scordilis Brownlee, The Severed Word: Ovid's Heroides and the Novela Sentimental (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990), 176-90.