SOURCE: Phillipy, Patricia. “‘Altera Dido’: The Model of Ovid's Heroides in the Poems of Gaspara Stampa and Veronica Franco.” In Love's Remedies: Recantation and Renaissance Lyric Poetry, pp. 1-18. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1995.

[In the following essay, Phillipy examines Stampa's and Franco's different uses of Ovid's Heroides to appropriate the Petrarchan lyric as a genre in which the female speaker is given a voice.]

Ovid's Heroides, a text in which a male author adopts the voices of female speakers, offered to Renaissance women writers a model of “feminine” writing with which to revise Petrarchism for use by women poets. Both Gaspara Stampa's Rime (1554) and Veronica Franco's Terze Rime (1575) show the influence of aspects of this Ovidian model.¹ Ovid's text reverses the discursive imperatives of Petrarchism, which assert to the woman poet-lover that she must write “like a man” if she is to adopt the voice of the Petrarchan poet, traditionally a male speaker. The female Petrarchan poet must cast her own voice within the conventions of the genre in the same way that the male poet Ovid chose to cast his voice within those of his heroines.

Stampa's and Franco's use of the Heroides allows us to pose the following question about feminine writing: in what ways does a text, written either by a male or female writer, manipulate aspects of a period's or culture's dominant castings of gender in order to challenge, overturn or revise this hegemonic view? The cases of Stampa and Franco are particularly well-suited to such a study insofar as we can locate their works within a well-described paradigm of gender relationships provided by the Petrarchan tradition in which both participated. Further, as members of a society whose expectations for women can be delineated in terms of the texts which women read, these poets' use of Ovid's model offers an opportunity to examine the ways in which these didactic texts (the Renaissance Heroides included) become the objects of revision and redirection—or the models for a transgressive treatment of the canon—in the texts which women write.

My interest in this article is to examine Stampa's and Franco's different uses of the Heroides to reappropriate the Petrarchan lyric as a genre in which the female speaker is given a voice. Stampa's use of Ovid's model willingly incorporates medieval and Renaissance commentator's views of the heroines as exempla, and casts herself within the poems as an exemplum. This exemplarity of the female figure in the Rime protects Stampa, insofar as she acts and speaks in accordance with male-sanctioned categories of feminine discourse within the exempla. It also challenges the authority of that sanctioning by presenting a female lover who is the model of fidelity, and a male beloved who is the exemplum of infidelity and cruelty. Responding to the anti-martial topos in the Heroides, Stampa uses the heroic epistle as the grounds for envisioning a new poetic which would allow the feminine voice to engage in lyric address with a masculine beloved, and which at the same time criticizes the heroic and lyric values from which that perspective emerges.

Franco, by contrast, exploits the Ovidian model to reject the ideologically mandated reading of the heroines as exempla of good or bad behavior for women's imitation or avoidance. Rosenthal has pointed out that the Heroides's dialogic letters XVI-XXI provide the model for Franco's dialogic Terze Rime itself (“Courtesan's Voice” 6). Taking her initiative from the works of Renaissance imitators of the Heroides, Franco associates most directly not with the exemplary aspect of the heroines as secular hagiographies, but with their virtuosity as writers and with their heroic aspects. Prompted by the rhetorical virtuosity of Ovid's heroines' letters, and of their Renaissance imitators, Franco creates an artistic world within her text in which to play out her narrative(s) of erotic and social exchange. In addition, Franco reappropriates the martial itself for use by the female speaker, and casts the female poet as Amazon. In poems like Capitoli 13 and 16, Franco literalizes the “battle of the sexes” and redefines the martial not only as a model of sexual interaction, but also as a question of writing. By moving the battlefield into the text itself, Franco challenges the ideological underpinnings of Petrarchism by asserting her victory over the language of the lyric, and specifically over the prior poems of the “maledico” and “incerto autore” whom her poems answer and challenge.

OVID'S “HEROIDES” AND RENAISSANCE EDITIONS AND IMITATIONS

The Heroides provides a view of a group of women whose experiences in love often, ironically, intersect and who, almost to a woman, share the common experience of abandonment by their male lovers. While each writer adopts the position of isolated abandonment, the text overall provides a series of allusions, cross-references and repetitions between and among the heroines and their situations. Thus Phyllis (Her II) calls to mind the model of Theseus' abandonment of Ariadne (Her X) to make sense of her own abandonment (26-27), and Helen (Her XVII) reminds herself and Paris of Jason's abandonment of Medea (240-41). Hypsipyle (Her VI), who calls her rival Medea a “barbarian jade” (“barbarapaelex,” 74-75), expresses her desire for the powers of her rival to induce the abandonment of yet another Hypsipyle: “I would have been Medea to Medea!” (“Medeae Medea forem!” 80-81). But Medea's representation as a “jade” by Hypsipyle is answered by Medea's own version of things later in Heroides XII. Hypsipyle's comment points toward the seemingly inevitable replication of abandonment experienced by women in these letters, as does Dido when she states: “alter habendus amor tibi restat et altera Dido; quamque iterum fallas altera danda fides” (“A second love remains for you to win, a second Dido; a second pledge to give, and a second time to prove false” 84-85).

By way of these and other cross-references between the letters of the Heroides, the work becomes a profoundly dialogic one (see Kauffman 23-25). As Jacobson sums up the work's multi-perspectivism, “By treating many events or myths more than once in the course of the Heroides, Ovid compels us to see that a myth or an event must be understood not as an absolute entity in itself but as the sum of the individual perspectives that bear upon it” (254-55). The result of this dialogism is to depict, over the cumulative experience of the letters, the fragmentation of the mythic and heroic worlds from which these heroines emerge, and the creation of a community of women whose experience of abandonment counters and censures the masculine heroic ethos.

Thus Ovid's representation of a community of women speakers has the novel result of undermining the epic ethos exemplified by such works as Virgil's Aeneid.² Indeed, it has been suggested that Heroides VII, Dido's letter to Aeneas, was the work that finally pushed the transgressive Ovid into exile (Jacobson 90). The choice to speak in women's voices is made on the basis of women's recognizably marginal status vis-à-vis the epic and its prominent role in Roman defenses of empire. The abandoned heroine, in Ovid's treatment, insists that her narrative is as important as the heroic narrative from which it emerges but from which it is radically separated. She insists, therefore, not only on the value of individuality over communality, but also on the value of individual perceptions as feminine, and thus on the exposure of universalizing mythologies as male-generated and interested.³

The Heroides, as it reached Stampa and Franco, however, had acquired a different character. From the late fifteenth century through the late sixteenth century, most Latin editions of the Heroides were printed with critical commentaries and prefaces which followed the model of medieval accessus, allowing for the allegorical reintroduction of Ovid's formerly subversive heroines into mainstream political and moral consensus. Indeed, as Brownlee has pointed out, rather than seeing the Heroides as a potential cause for Ovid's exile, the medieval view of the work considered it, rather than the Ex Ponto, to be the work written in order to win imperial favor and thus be recalled from exile (“Hermeneutic Transgressions” 104). The late-Renaissance coupling of the medievalizing didactic approach of the early commentators by a Horatian poetic which stressed poetry's power to “teach, delight and move” only further framed Ovid's text within a critical apparatus which could explicate the genre's value to instruct women with Ovid's moral exempla (Moss 11).⁴

Medieval and Renaissance editions of the Heroides served by and large to reframe (and thus defuse) Ovid's dangerous heroines within didactic treatments which saw the women as exemplary figures of vice and virtue, suitable for the instruction of modern women in the same. Volscus describes the purpose and use of Ovid's work as follows:

Materia huius libri sunt mores: & vitia dominarum. Intentio enim versatur circa materiam. Intendit enim Ovid, doctor & narrator de utilis & moribus dominarum: & de casto & incasto amore tractare. Dominas de casto amore commendare: de impudico vero vituperare. Utilitas libri magna est: nam cogito modo isto cognoscuntur mulieres caste amantes: & dominae impudicae amantes.

(Habes Candide … Fol. IIv)⁵

(The matter of this book is the character and vices of women. Indeed, the intention revolves around the matter, for Ovid, the learned narrator, intends to treat what is useful and the character of women and chaste and unchaste love, to commend women regarding chaste love and to condemn them for immodesty. The utility of the book is great, for I think that in this way women loving chastely and mistresses loving immodestly are both recognized.)

While Ovid's original work may have offered “individual psychologies rather than psychological paradigms—the latter being the usual identification of these heroines as universal archetypes” (Brownlee, “Hermeneutic Transgression” 113), the Renaissance reception of Ovid's heroines very much reenforced their identification as exempla. This emphasis on the exemplary in the Heroides clearly poses a challenge to the easy reappropriation by female Petrarchans of the “subversive” female voice of the heroic epistle. Rather, it aligns Ovid's work with those most often intended to be read by women: the works of the querelle des femmes, composed for the most part of the lives of illustrious women, good or evil, and the (usually male) author's didactic explication of the value of the sacred or secular hagiography as a moral exemplum for imitation by the woman reader.⁶ As such, the Heroides offered a model which may be considered both accessible and attractive to female readers and writers, but one whose power to overturn or revise traditional gender paradigms was clearly diminished given the reconsignment of Ovid's subversive heroines to their tamer, and ideologically tamed, roles as exempla of feminine behavior.

While the exemplary treatment of Ovid's heroines thus mediates Franco's and especially Stampa's approach to the Heroides, Renaissance versions of the work inform their poems' formal and thematic choices. Stampa's decision to end her sonnet sequence with a series of capitoli (nos. 286-291 in the original 1554 edition, and nos. 241-46 as reordered by Salza)⁷ and Franco's use of the form are indebted to recent versions of the heroic epistle (based on the Ovidian model) and to editions and translations of the Heroides. Remigio Fiorentino's 1555 translation of the Heroides, which made use of the capitolo, most probably provided the formal model for Franco's Terze Rime (Rosenthal, “Courtesan's Voice” 7). However, Remigio's decision to recast Ovid's epistles in capitoli rested on the emergence of the heroic epistle in terza rima as a genre in the second half of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries (Longhi 389).⁸

The Heroides provided material for imitation by lyric poets working both in Latin and in the vernacular. Niccolò da Correggio's “Como Penelopé scrisse al suo Ulisse,” for example (written in 1482), follows the Ovidian model and allows the male poet to take on the female speaker's voice to engage in anti-martial complaint. In the same year, Tebaldeo included in his Latin Carmina two heroic epistles which, in imitation of the double letters of the Heroides, present the female voice of “Beatrice” addressing the character “Niccolò da Correggio”, and Niccolò's reply (in Pasquazi, 42-45). While the letter in Beatrice's voice adheres closely to the Ovidian model and reiterates stock images and gestures, Niccolò's reply takes the occasion to praise Beatrice's persuasive anti-martial rhetoric (and thus Tebaldeo's poetic prowess) by comparison with that of Ovid's heroines:

Dat calamum tibi doctus Amor, tibi verba ministrat,
                    Scribentemque regit sedulus ille manum.
Talia Penelope si scripta dedisset Ulixi,
                    Liquisset celeri Dorica castra fuga.
Si Phaedrae quondam facundia tanta fuisset,
                    Hippolyti poterat vincere duriciem.
His Dido Aeneam verbis mentemque mariti
                    Flexisset natis Colchis acerba suis. …
Captasti verbis captum in certamine Martis:
                    Hei mihi, quam capto plus tua vincla nocent!

(25-32; 43-44)

(Learned Love supplies you with pen and words,
                    And carefully guides your hand as you write.
Had Penelope written such words to her Ulysses,
                    He would have left the Greek encampment at once.
Had Phaedra once possessed such eloquence
                    She would have conquered the harsh Hippolytus.
With words like these, Dido would have moved Aeneas
                    And cruel Medea would have moved her husband. …
With words you lure your captive in contest with Mars,
                    O how much more your chains injure me, your captive.)(9)

Niccolò's adoption of the female voice in imitation of the exemplary Penelope is closely aligned with Stampa's self-representation in her anti-martial lyrics, while Tebaldeo's “double letter” is more closely aligned with Franco's use of the Heroides. Franco follows the lead of her contemporary imitators of Ovid in revising the anti-martial polemic of the Heroides by giving voice to the “abandoned” male figure. Further, the virtuosity of Tebaldeo's poetic dialogue between himself, “Niccolò,” and Ovid (as surpassed by “Beatrice”) informs Franco's orchestration of her dialogic capitoli. Tebaldeo's empowering of the female figure, in the male speaker's acknowledgement of the woman as “captor,” permits Franco's female speaker to assume martial characteristics. This, as we shall see, is the project of the cartelli di sfida of Capitoli 13 and 16.¹⁰

GASPARA STAMPA'S EXEMPLARY ABANDONMENT

Stampa explains in her dedicatory epistle that the Rime's purpose, like that of Ovid's heroic epistles, is to recall the memory of the abandoned woman: “il quale refreschi così lontano la memoria della sua dimenticata ed abbandonata Anassilla” (xiii). Stampa thus assumes the role exemplified by Ovid's heroines. It is in this sense, rather than in criticism's traditional view of Stampa's poems as an autobiographical record, that the poems are “epistolary.”¹¹ In borrowing her stance from Ovid's heroines and presenting her case as “le giuste mie querele” (#68, 29), Stampa casts her own poetic voice within the genres available to her (Petrarchism, the heroic epistle, the “querela” or complaint) and recasts these genres by combining and juxtaposing them within the same work. The result is Stampa's reinscription of Petrarchism within an alternative realm of discourse provided by Ovid's heroines.

For Stampa, the literature of the querelle des femmes, especially the “querele” of Ovid's heroines as they are allegorized by medieval and Renaissance commentaries, provides an alternative discourse to Petrarchism, in which the exemplum is the chief convention.¹² Within the lyric world of the Rime, the exemplary discourse provided by the Heroides introduces a discourse marginal to heroism as well as to Petrarchism, which revises both. It is the ongoing narrative of the exploitation of women, both within epic actions themselves and by Renaissance commentators on Ovid who recast female abandonment as exemplary, which is relevant and familiar to the female audience addressed in many of Stampa's poems.

As I have argued elsewhere, Stampa's decision to turn toward the capitolo in nos. 286-91 (Salza's nos. 241-46) replaces Petrarch's penitential model in the Rime sparse with a gesture toward feminine community which is directly indebted to the model of Ovid's heroines (Phillippy 1-3). Each of these capitoli is comprised of an anti-martial lament spoken in the voice of the abandoned woman and addressed to an audience of “donne.” Her gesture toward the ongoing narrative of feminine abandonment in her capitoli suggests that the abandoned Anassilla is one of countless women who could be called an “altera Dido.” Stampa's invocation of a community of women which includes such Ovidian heroines as Sappho and Dido as well as contemporary “donne” suggests her participation in an on-going querelle, between feminine marginality and masculine literary centrality in the Petrarchan lyric and epic alike.

The exemplary suffering of Dido provides, in Stampa's #48, the model for the poet's self-representation as the abandoned woman. Dido writes:

Sic ubi fata vocant, udis abiectus in herbis
                    ad vada Maeandri concinit albus olor.
Nec quia te nostra sperem prece posse moveri,
                    adloquor—adverso movimus ista deo;
sed merita et famam corpusque animumque pudicum
                    cum male perididerim, perdere verba leve est.

(Thus at the summons of fate, casting himself down amid the watery grasses by the shallows of Maender, sings the white swan.

Not because I hope you may be moved by prayer of mine do I address you—for which God's will adverse I have begun the words you read; but because after wretched losing of desert, of reputation, and of purity of body and soul, the losing of words is a matter slight indeed.)

(Her 82-83)

Here, the notion of lost words, presented directly after the distracting, emotive portrait of the dying swan, is indirectly accusatory toward Aeneas. At the same time, this gesture allows Dido to dramatize her situation and her helplessness in a style which, paradoxically, assures the reader of the speaker's rhetorical mastery and self-determination.

Stampa adopts Dido's image and stance in her “querela,” and applies the larger exemplary and mythological paradigm to her specific situation with her beloved, Collaltino di Collalto.

                    Come l'augel, ch'à Febo è grato tanto,
Sovra Meandro, ove suol far soggiorno,
Quando s'accosta il suo ultimo giorno,
Move più dolce le querele e 'l canto,
                    Tal' io, lontana dal bel viso santo,
Sovra il superbo d'Adria e ricco corno,
Morte, tema & horror' havendo intorno,
Affino, lassa, le querele e 'l pianto.
                    E sono in questo à quell'uccel minore:
Che per quella, onde venne, istessa traccia
Ritorna à Febo il suo diletto Olore;
                    Ed io, perche morendo mi disfaccia,
Non pur non torno a star col mio Signore,
Ma temo che di me tutto gli spiaccia.

Stampa's poem, as lost language or as swan song, necessarily defers the speaker's remedy—silence—in order to permit her continued activity and power. Longhi's comments on the function of the heroic epistle are equally applicable to this sonnet: “La funzione della lettera, oltre ogni volontà di comunicare, e sollecitare una risposta che non verrà, appare allora quella di procurare una dilazione. Scrivere è differire” (391). By writing in order to defer death, Stampa casts herself as an exemplary figure of martyrdom. The relationship of beloved to poet as Apollo to swan plays out Stampa's submission (which here and elsewhere she relates to gender) by incorporating an unalterable mythic paradigm provided by the Heroides into the Petrarchan relationship between lovers. At the same time, however, this submission is scrutinized within the poem, with the result that the poet's inferiority is valued at the expense of the beloved's godlike status.

Stampa's anti-martial complaint becomes, in Rime #91, “Novo e raro miracol di Natura,” the grounds on which “feminine” qualities—passivity, constancy, and the rhetorical stance of the lament itself—are elevated beyond those masculine qualities of heroism. Elsewhere in the text, Stampa states that the beloved's devotion to heroic duty constitutes cruelty to the speaker and neglect of the demands of love (thus of the world of the lyric, its content and its influence). Here, the speaker exploits the values of the epic to overturn those values and assert her “victory,” by way of constant love and the lyric which expresses it, over time itself. The poem begins by praising the beloved's “valore,” but ends by seeing the speaker's “dolore” as a force conquering that heroic trait (5-8). Stampa continues, “Quant'ei tutt'altri Cavalieri eccede / In esser bello, nobile & ardito, / Tanto è vinto da me, da la mia fede” (9-11).

Stampa's presentation of herself as Collaltino's poet is always marked in the Rime, as it is in this poem, by the feminine censure of the martial, the charge that the knight lacks “cortesia” (#46, 9), and is, like Dido's Aeneas, “crudo e selvaggio” (#178, 1) (cf. Her 84-87).¹³ This censure of the heroic, as in the letters of Ovid's heroines, argues in favor of the amorous (indeed, of the civilized) as a respite from the continual self-exile of the heroic. Poems such as #104, “O notte, à me più chiara, e più beata” and #158, “Deh lasciate, Signor, le maggior cure,” reflect this amorous repose, reminiscent of Alcina's garden or Armida's isle; a distraction from the heroic, but one which, Stampa and Ovid's heroines suggest, has a validity of its own.

Thus the female figure in Stampa's anti-martial poems signals the retreat from negotium, into the leisurely contemplation of gentle subjects, including love.¹⁴ These “Circean” aspects of Stampa's plea are clearly a risk that the Rime takes and upon which it meditates, but one for which it never apologizes. Stampa's refusal to repent throughout the Rime aligns her more closely to the models of Ovid's heroines (Phyllis, Medea, and Hypermnestra, for example, Her 24-25, 158-59 and 170-71) than to that offered by Petrarch.¹⁵

Throughout the Rime, Stampa's self-elevation at the expense of the heroic values exemplified by the beloved valorizes the passive (and specifically feminine) qualities of the Petrarchan speaker as the virtues of the abandoned woman. While supporting the overarching structure of the Petrarchan modes of praise and lamentation, this stance alters the balance of power within the Petrarchan erotic paradigm specifically by pointing to the limitations of that model on the discourse of a female speaker and by making strengths of those weaknesses.

This doubled stance is suggested in Stampa's use of female exempla and in her self-representation as exemplary. In Rime #86, the complexities of Stampa's relationship to Petrarch and its mediation by the Heroides are clearly displayed in the speaker's self-presentation as an exemplum. Stampa begins by calling on a community of women to mourn the cruelty of her absent beloved: “Piangete, donne, e poi che la mia morte / Non move il Signor mio crudo e lontano” (1-2). Echoing Petrarch's #92, “Piangete, Donne, e con voi pianga Amor,” the elegy for Cino, Stampa equates herself with the celebrated troubadour, and by further adopting the Ovidian epitaph (used in the epistles of Phyllis, Dido and Sappho, Her 30-31, 98-99, and 192-93) she equates herself with the abandoned heroines of the Heroides, openly asserting her exemplary status in the final line:

                    E, poi ch'io sarò cenere e favilla,
Dica alcuna di voi mesta e pietosa,
Sentita del mio foco una scintilla,
                    —Sotto quest'aspra pietra giace ascosa
L'infelice e fidissima Anassilla,
Raro essempio di fede alta amorosa.

(9-14)¹⁶

Within the Rime, female exempla (Dido in #48, Progne and Filomena in #173, or Stampa herself) are figures of the marginality of feminine erotic experience and voice which are incorporated in the Rime as a continuation of the didactic use of exempla in the querelle des femmes and the Renaissance Heroides. In Stampa's treatment, these exemplary figures aspire to occupy an endlessly repeating, and therefore invincible, position as exempla which is strengthened by Stampa's usage and, in turn, strengthens her individual erotic narrative by comparison with these universally famous feminine narratives.

VERONICA FRANCO'S ANTI-DIDACTIC HEROIDES

Veronica Franco's Capitolo 3, “Questa la tua fedel Franca ti scrive,” like Stampa's lyrics, makes use of the exempla of Progne, Filomena (25) and Echo (17), and the poem echoes Stampa's relationship to the Ovidian epistolary model provided by the Heroides.¹⁷ The capitolo is a lament in the absence of the beloved which, if only in passing, incorporates the Ovidian heroic topos with a significant difference. Having described the absent lover as “il mio Apollo” (63), Franco continues:

E da lui vinta in amorosa guerra,
                    Seguirol di timor con alma casa,
                    Per la via del valor, ond'ei non erra,
Quest'è l'amante mio, ch'ogni altro passa
                    In sopportar gli affanni; e in fedeltate
                    Ogni altro piu fedel dietro si lassa.

(64-69)

The idea of an “amorosa guerra” is one which points toward the revisionary treatment of the Heroides' anti-heroic polemic given to the Ovidian model by Franco's capitoli. Here, and elsewhere in the Terze Rime, the lament of the abandoned heroine by the cruel epic hero is rewritten not only by the explicit content of Franco's contributions to the work, but by their juxtaposition with the contributions of the “incerto autore” whose lyrics offer a second perspective, much like that provided in the Heroides' double letters XVI-XXI, on the events informing Franco's lyric. Occasionally—as is the case, for example, in Capitolo 4, immediately following Franco's lament in absence—the lyrics of the “incerto autore” offer laments which echo those of the female speaker. Frequently, the male speaker attributes the blame for his suffering to the lady's cruelty, a gesture which counters that of Ovid's heroines (who blame their male counterparts' epic preoccupations) but which calls on the traditional stance of the male lover within the Petrarchan erotic paradigm. For example, Capitolo 9, “Donna, la vostra lontananza è stata”, provides “le querele” (31) and “i lamenti” (39) of the absence of the female beloved in Petrarchan tones which are revised by the presence of the Heroides' lamentational and epistolary model. As Ovid's anti-heroic topos is modified by the Petrarchan voice in the capitoli, so Petrarchism's view of the lady's cruelty and unattainability is tempered by the expression of “un amor mutuo” (Cap. 2, 185) inspired by the double letters of the Heroides. In Capitolo 7, “Dunque l'alta beltà, ch'amica stella,” the male speaker echoes both his Petrarchan predecessors, in charging Franco with “crudeltà,” and Ovid's heroines by offering, as he states it, “le mie querele e i miei lamenti” (128). Franco overturns the male speaker's rhetoric in Capitolo 8, “Ben vorrei fosse, come dite voi,” by refusing the charges against her (that she is cruel and immune to the effects of love), and she goes on to describe a world of erotic exchange which, in its sense of repetition and replaceability, seems indebted to the dialogic world of the Heroides:

Fors'anco Amor del comun pianto ride,
                    E, per far lagrimar piu sempre il mondo,
                    L'altrui desir discompagna, & divide.
E, mentre che di ciò si fa giocondo,
                    De le lagrime nostre il largo mare
                    Sempre piu si fa cupo, & piu profondo:
Che, s'huom potesse a suo diletto amare,
                    Senza trovar contrarie voglie opposte,
                    L'amorosa piacer non havria pare.

(77-85)

The world of erotic exchange comically described in Capitolo 8 is indebted to Franco's reading of Ovid's Heroides, and her emphasis on that work's dialogic and multi-perspectival approach to erotic narrative. Franco overlooks the characteristics of the Renaissance Heroides stressed by Stampa—the exemplary natures of the heroines and their anti-heroic polemic—and is influenced, instead, by the dialogism of the work, especially as it appears in Ovid's double letters, and virtuosity. Rosenthal has discussed the cast of characters in Franco's Terze Rime, “the dialect poet,” “the satirical poet,” the “incerto autore” and Franco as speaker, (“Veronica Franco” 248-49). Franco's work incorporates the dialogic interplay between male and female speakers in its first 14 capitoli, but inverts the structure of the Heroides by turning from dialogue to monologue in the poems following Capitolo 15, all of which are in the voice of the female speaker. The shift suggests that the work's capitoli, like the Heroides' epistles, have a cumulative effect as a collection which both serves as context for and is created by the individual contributions of Franco and the “incerto autore” within the text itself. In the case of the Heroides, as suggested above, this cumulative result is the delineation of a repetitive, continuous narrative of feminine abandonment in which the individual heroines' stories are interwoven. In the case of Franco's Terze Rime, the effect of the move from dialogue to monologue in the collection suggests the emergence of an individual female speaker who portrays herself as a unique spokesperson for the group of women whom she represents, and a virtuoso performer within the literary and social conventions which she employs.

A good example of this contextualization of individual poems by the poems as a group is provided by Capitoli 17 and 18. Capitolo 17, “Questa la tua Veronica ti scrive,” opens with an exordium to the unfaithful beloved which is among the text's closest imitations of Ovid's Heroides.¹⁸ Immediately following this lengthy complaint (occasioned by the beloved's address of poems to another lady), Franco tempers and undermines the Ovidian voice of lament within her work by appending Capitolo 18, “Molto illustre Signor, quel che hier sera.” Here, the speaker offers thanks to a third party who the previous evening advised the speaker not to send the epistolary Capitolo 17, and asks for help in composing a poem more likely to win back her straying beloved. Rather than presenting the Ovidian heroine's lament as the dominant stance available to Franco as speaker, she embeds that stance within an ongoing, ever-changing discourse on love in which she adopts a variety of voices and views.

Franco's dialogic choice for the structure of her work represents an intersection between the Ovidian textual model and the socio-historical context in which her poems were written. Rosenthal suggests that “Whereas Ovid's heroines's laments are confined to a two-way trajectory and never exceed the letter's insular boundaries, Franco's woman speaker's accusations refer and appeal (in the tradition of satire) to a recognizable and tight-knit Venetian society” (“Courtesan's Voice” 14). Given the web of allusions, cross-reference and contradiction presented by the progressive dialogue of speakers in the Heroides, it seems possible that Franco's placement of her Ovidian complaint within the setting of a social dialogue is itself influenced by Ovid's text. In fact, this positing of a society beyond the world of the heroic epistle substitutes for the mythological backdrops before which Ovid's heroines perform. This replacement of the heroic world (dominated by male heroes) by the world of Venetian society, specifically the salon and academy, redefines the nature of the heroic epistle as a lyric instrument and as a social tool. By relocating feminine lament within the landscape of actual social exchange, Franco decenters the epic as the master narrative of importance to these speakers or these poems.

As we saw above, Stampa's Rime make use of the Ovidian model of feminine anti-heroic complaint and exemplary feminine abandonment provided by the Heroides to revise Petrarchism's traditional complaint of the absent lover for use by the female writer. Franco's capitoli also revise Petrarchism specifically by incorporating the heroic epistle, in both male and female voices, within the lyric. But rather than adopting the stance of the abandoned heroine as the position from which to censure both Petrarchan and heroic values, Franco reappropriates epic values for her own purposes. If Stampa's poems owe their self-perceptions of their female protagonist to the epic's female figures of otium, Alcina and Armida, Franco more closely associates herself with the female warriors of the Italian epic: Bradamante, Marfisa, Clorinda.¹⁹

In Capitolo 13, “Non piu parole, a i fatti, in campo a l'armi” and Capitolo 16, “D'ardito cavalier non è prodezza,” Franco revamps the masculine language of the epic, the language of chivalry, for use in her self-representation as virago. Capitolo 13 opens by issuing a “challenge” (“cartel” 4) to the male addressee, and the female speaker, armed with the language of chivalry, goes on to reveal that the field of this battle of the sexes is to be her “letto” (34), and the battle itself an erotic, rather than martial, struggle:

Dal petto ignudo ogni arnese sia tolto,
                    Al fin, ch'ei disarmato a le ferite,
                    Possa 'l valor mostrar dentro a se accolto:

(52-54)

Franco clearly undermines both the Petrarchan view of the chaste, silent female partner, with her humorous portrayal of sexuality, and the Ovidian anti-heroic topos, by exploiting martial discourse as, metaphorically, erotic discourse. She implicitly censures the role assigned to women within both the epic and the Petrarchan traditions by displaying the vulnerability of both Petrarchan and heroic languages to (mis)use by the female poet. The very fact that the female poet is able to conquer these discourses points toward and undoes the confinements these systems place on the female character and speaker.

Capitolo 16 replies to a poem by a male writer, Maffio Venier's “Ver Unica Puttana,” a defamatory piece directed at Franco as courtesan.²⁰ The poem opens by upholding the identity of the writer as a “cavalier,” but the poem, like Capitolo 13, redefines the martial and the woman speaker's relationship to it. No longer is the poem a lament for the absence of the heroic beloved, engaged in the duties of warfare. Rather, the poem stages a battle between the poet and the hero whose grounds is the defense of women, especially of Franco herself, against blame: “Spogliata, e sola, e incauta mi coglieste, / Debil d'animo, e in armi non esperta, / E robusto & armato m'offendeste” (22-24). Throughout, Franco speaks in defense of her own and other women's power. This is a power which is a challenge, literally, to the martial prowess and, figuratively, to the poetic prowess, of men.

While Franco admits that women are inexpert in the exercise of arms, and are physically weaker than men, nonetheless she prompts the addressee onto the field of battle, making strengths of those admitted weaknesses:

Quando armate ed esperte ancor siam noi,
                    Render buon conto a ciascun' huom potemo,
                    Che mani, e piedi, e core avem qual voi,
E, se ben molli e delicato semo,
                    Ancor tal uom, ch'è delicato, è forte;
                    E tal, ruvido ed aspro, è d'ardir scemo:
Di ciò non se ne son le Donne accorte;
                    Che, se si risolvessero di farlo,
                    Con voi pugnar porian fino a la morte:
E per farvi veder che 'l vero parlo;
                    Tra tante Donne incominciar voglio io,
                    Porgendo essempio a lor di seguitarlo.

(64-75)

Here, Franco undermines the gender categories of male and female by asserting that appearances, and stereotypes, can be deceiving: women who seem weak may in fact be stronger than some men, while some men who seem to be strong may, in fact, be weak. It is within this uncertain context, in which categories and types are actively being challenged and overturned, that Franco returns to the idea of the exemplum. Like Stampa, and like Ovid's heroines, Franco invokes a community of women who are set in opposition to the masculine heroic world, and who are also set in opposition to the commonplaces of masculine discourse, the Petrarchan and heroic included. But within this world of shifting and surprisingly indefinite definitions, Franco's exemplarity seems makeshift and contingent—a counter-exemplum to the ongoing narrative of feminine abandonment in which the female exemplary figures available in her sources participate. Franco's exemplary status rests not on the unwavering constancy of her love, which, for Stampa, surpasses heroic values, but on her successful engagement with men in their own sphere, and on the very pragmatic level of reputation (169-74).

Franco's battleground, in fact, becomes the ground of the canzone itself, and the weapon is language: “La spada, che 'n man vostra rade, & fora, / De la lingua volgar Venetiana” (112-13). In this realm of combat, Franco's strengths equal and, she asserts, surpass those of her opponent. By recasting the martial within the borders of the lyric itself, Franco at once revises Stampa's lamentational relationship to the epic and wittily re-envisions the martial as sexual and poetic warfare. Here, that ongoing debate is literalized as a debate about masculine and feminine uses of discourse. By relocating the material within the lyric, Franco wins the battle by conquering language itself.²¹

Franco's revision of the martial as the battle of the sexes revises the female Petrarchans' relationship to their masculine traditions specifically by making the battle a rhetorical one, fought within the realm of the lyric itself and won through the virtuoso mastery of poetic forms and languages by the female poet. Capitoli 13 and 16 relocate the martial within the salon and bedroom, and, informed by the pragmatic concerns of women occupying that world, displays feminine power over masculine literary discourses and models, the heroic included. The function of Franco as spokesperson for that world, meanwhile, undermines the Petrarchan values sustained, though in an altered form, by Stampa. The lament of the absent lover which creates of Stampa an exemplum of feminine constancy becomes, in Franco, the victory over masculine epic and lyric forms which creates a far more ambiguous, far less passive, model, indebted not to Renaissance versions of the Heroides as an exemplary text but to Franco's reaction to the dialogism and virtuosity of Ovid's original work.

Notes

1. I have discussed elsewhere Stampa's debt to the Heroides in revising the penitential model of Petrarch's Rime sparse. Rosenthal, “Courtesan's Voice,” discusses Franco's use of the Heroides in her Terze Rime and Lettere familiari.

2. Ovid's achievement in the Heroides is so novel that he claimed authorship of the new genre, the heroic epistle, in Ars Amatoria 3:345-46, “Ignotum hoc aliis ille novavit opus” (“He first invented this art, unknown to others”).

3. It is significant in this context that the women of the Heroides both veil and expose Ovid's own subversive poetic as “feminized,” in light of its recognizable self-marginalization from the heroic culture of the Empire. See Kauffman, 33-34 and 38-41 for a discussion of Ovid's expressions of the comparison between himself in exile and the abandoned heroines of the Heroides.

4. See, for instance, Morillo's introduction to the Heroidum Epistolae (1588), esp. 6.

5. I wish to thank my colleague, Dr. Craig Kallendorf, for his assistance in editing and translating this passage. The passage has been modernized with respect to punctuation and abbreviations.

6. See Utley's introduction to The Crooked Rib for a discussion of the ubiquitous presence of the exemplum within the literature of the querelle des femmes. See also Jordan, 2 and 86-94 on the persistence of the medieval querelle into the Renaissance.

7. See Salza, ed. Stampa-Franco: Rime, esp. 372-73, and his 1913 article, “Madonna Gasparina Stampa secondo nuove indagini.” Modern editions of the Rime, including that of Bellonci, follow Salza's reordering and thus also distract attention from the significance of the works' formal choices to end with the capitoli addressed to women and the madrigali. Jones notes that “Bellonci accepts Salza's reordering of the sequence, which suggests a religious conversion and suppresses the Neoplatonic turn with which it ends in the 1554 original” (214, note 22). While I agree with the suggestion of a religious conversion in Salza's restructuring, I disagree with the assertion that a reading which stresses the sequence's neoplatonism is the most fruitful. Because I believe the original order of the poems embodies Stampa's turn toward the model of feminine community described in the Heroides, all references are to the 1554 Venetian edition of Stampa's poems. I give both the original numbering of Stampa's poems and Salza's renumbering (when there is a distinction) throughout this essay.

8. The Viridario by Giovanni Filoteo Achillini (1513), an ottava rima piece which rehearses the matter of Thebes, includes letters by Phaedra to Hippolytus (in imitation of Heroides IV) and Ariadne to Theseus, modeled not on Heroides X but on Olympia's lament in Canto X of Orlando Furioso. Pavlock, 149-70, discusses Ariosto's use of Ovid's Ariadne.

9. Translation by Dr. Craig Kallendorf.

10. Rosenthal, “Veronica Franco”, 254, suggests that Franco follows the etiquette of the “cartello di sfida” (the call to duel) in Capitolo 16.

11. Donadoni's estimation of Stampa's work, “Il suo libro è il documento di un palpitante cuore di donna, prima e più che una finzione di poesia” (97), is typical of the thrust of this critical approach. See also Croce, 225 and “Memorie intorno alla vita di G. Stampa,” in Bergalli and Zeno, xvi-xviii.

12. Characters in the Heroides who describe their epistles as a complaint or “querela” include Penelope (14-15), Phyllis (20-21), Briseis (32-33), Oenone (58-59), Hypsipyle (70-71), Hermione (102-103), Deianira (108-09), Hypermnestra (178-79), Sappho (186-87), Helen (224-25), and Leander (258-59).

13. Stampa's censure of the martial is a frequent and recurring theme throughout the Rime: see, for example, nos. 10, 11, 36, 52, 62, 79, 80, 97, and 142.

14. I disagree with Ann R. Jones' suggestion that the anti-heroic rhetoric of the Rime is one feature of the work's exploitation of the pastoral as a tool of complaint and satire (125-41). I believe that this characteristic can more effectively be assigned to the representation of the feminine voice within the Italian Renaissance epic and in the Heroides.

15. Stampa's anti-martial elevation of the lovers' escape from heroic negotium echoes Briseis' comments to Achilles in Heroides III, where she is, ironically, attempting to shame Achilles to return to battle and thus to her: “tutius est iacuisse toro, tenuisse puellam, / Threiciam digitis increpuisse lyram, / quam manibus clipeos et acutae cuspidis hastam, / et galeam pressa sustinuisse coma” (“Safer it is to lie on the couch, to clasp a sweetheart in your arms, to tinkle with your fingers the Thracian lyre, than to take in hand the shield, and the spear with sharpened point, and to sustain upon your locks the helmet's weight,” 40-41).

16. See also Rime nos. 6, 32, 64 and 151 for Stampa's self-representation as exemplum.

17. All references are to the 1575 Venetian edition of Franco's Terze Rime.

18. Capitoli 3 and 20 also open with exordia. See Rosenthal, “Courtesan's Voice,” 8.

19. Rosenthal, “Veronica Franco” (243 and 252) discusses Franco's debt to representations of the female warrior, especially in Ariosto. See also Jones, 192-93, who associates Franco's adoption of the masculine language of chivalry with Renaissance transvestism.

20. See Rosenthal, “Veronica Franco,” 250-51, for a discussion of the role of Maffio Venier within Franco's work, and her confusion between Maffio and Marco Venier as authors of the insulting “Ver Unica Puttana.”

21. For instance, replying to Venier's playing on Franco's name in “Ver Unica Puttana,” Franco points out that “unica” is, in fact, a term of praise (139ff.). She continues, “Questo non è (Signor) fallo d'accenti, / Quello, in che s'invehisce, nominare / Col titol de le cose piu eccellenti. / O voi non mi voleste biasimare; / O in questo dir menzogna non sapeste” (157-61).

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