ABSTRACT
Gaspara Stampa’s Rime, published in 1554, can be situated in the heyday of Cinquecento Petrarchism, which has Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta as the most influential model, in terms of structure as well as in its underlying concept of love. What is characteristic of Petrarchist poetry of this period is the variation of the model, which nonetheless maintains the dominant reference to Petrarch. This manifests itself in the diverse compensation strategies that, despite all the variatio, demonstrate the effort to stay inside the confines of the “Petrarchan system,” as contemporaries defined it. 1 Nevertheless, the sixteenth century saw the emergence of its own Petrarchist models: the most important representatives of this development are Pietro Bembo and Vittoria Colonna. Especially, Colonna’s widely circulating Rime amorose, published in 1538, established a particular model of women’s poetry in the wake of Petrarch. This is evidenced by not only the fact that her poetry appeared in multiple editions and, as is assumed, that they already circulated in manuscript form, but also by the numerous, verifiable references to this collection by other women poets. In brief, Colonna’s Rime are marked by a clear reference to the Petrarchan model, which they modify at the same time. Besides the modeling through Neoplatonic elements, the gender-specific recoding is especially pertinent: in the case of women-penned poetry, a female speaker now takes the role of the lover and the woman poet, addressing a male beloved. This constellation—simply and already for reasons of decorum—entails several other modifications which concern not only the shaping of the roles of lover and beloved but also their mutual relation and how to talk about it. Here—apart from the reference to Petrarch—a “second legitimation” 2 of the writing emerges and, accordingly, how to discuss it now becomes relevant: it resulted in recourse to the elegiac tradition, namely as it was shaped in Ovid’s Heroides, the collection of letters from mostly mythological women figures to their absent husbands or lovers. This represented a model—fictive, in this case—of female writing and talking about love which had already been mediated in the Italian tradition through Boccaccio’s Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta and succeeding (male) authors, and to which women poets could refer in various ways. 3 Colonna’s Rime d’amore already explore this link to the elegiac tradition in its female variant; for the women poets succeeding her, these Rime form a complex model of reference with specific emphases and shifts.
