ABSTRACT
The myth of Gaspara Stampa’s unhappy relationship with the Venetian nobleman Collaltino di Collalto is recounted throughout the poet’s Rime, a narrative whose details are well known: Stampa and Collaltino met in 1548 and they remained together, through highs and lows, for three years. Their mutual feelings were deeply unbalanced, however, with the poet showing an intense and unflinching commitment to her beloved, while he is generally characterized as having a cold and inconstant attitude towards her. For this reason, with the exception of sporadic moments of fulfillment, Stampa presented herself as living in a state of constant frustration until the count eventually ended their relationship, at which point she was struck with a seemingly interminable despair that she continued to document in her poetry. By presenting herself as a neglected, rejected, and ultimately abandoned woman, Stampa includes her poetic narrative within a longstanding Greco-Roman literary tradition of abandoned female lovers, identifying herself with iconic figures like Medea, Ariadne, Sappho, and Dido, as well as their medieval and early modern Italian counterparts, such as Boccaccio’s Fiammetta and Ariosto’s Olimpia. In her poetry she recalls the archetypal model for tales of abandoned women—Ovid’s Heroides, at the time a new genre devoted to the representation of female sorrow that would continue be popular for centuries to come. The fictional letters contained within the Heroides are addressed to distant husbands and beloveds and recall unhappy relationships through passionate and afflicted monologues. The Heroides are a poetry of lament, where mythical affairs of the epic and Hellenistic traditions are gathered and adapted to an epistolary mode built on women’s fictional voices.
