ABSTRACT
French chaplain Andreas Capellanus's twelfth-century treatise De Amore provided generations of European writers a cornucopia of misogynist tropes while codifying the conventions of courtly love. Capellanus's treatise, written in Latin and widely influential, defines female invidia within one of the earliest essentializing definitions of gendered identity in the European Middle Ages. The trope of female invidia threads through widely disparate medieval and Renaissance discourses; one can find instances in treatises on the dignity of women, sermons, novelle, plays, and poetry. In 1487 female neo-Latin humanist Laura Cereta penned a letter to Lucilia Vernacula in which she inveighed against the uneducated women who disparaged educated women. The case of Laura Cereta illustrates how, for the early generations of women writers, confronting medieval depictions of women was a delicate balancing act. The opening verse of Gaspara Stampa's first sonnet is a clear echo of Petrarch's famous incipit, and reveals a studied and thoughtful engagement with his first sonnet.
