Desiring subjects: mimetic desire and female Invidia in Gaspara Stampa’s Rime

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© Copyrighted Materialww

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mChapter 4 Desiring Subjects:

Mimetic Desire and Female Invidia in Gaspara Stampa’s Rime*

Aileen A. Feng, University of Arizona

French chaplain Andreas Capellanus’s twelfth-century treatise De Amore (ca. 1186–1196) provided generations of European writers a cornucopia of misogynist tropes while codifying the conventions of courtly love.1 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. Commissioned by Marie de Champagne, and set in the French court of her mother Aliénor (Eleanor) d’Aquitaine, the work is a dialogue between Capellanus and his young pupil Walter, whom he instructs in matters of love. Throughout the first two books, Capellanus often authorizes his advice to Walter by claiming his lessons to be based on the adjudications of Marie and Eleanor, whose debates he recounts in thorough detail.2 In the third book (De reprobatione amoris), however, Capellanus reverses all of his instruction to the young Walter by advising him to avoid women, and love, at all costs. The earlier, liberal portrayal of courtly women as benchmarks for behavior and social mores gives way to a vitriolic diatribe

* I would like to thank Unn Falkeid, Paul Hurh, Ann Rosalind Jones, and Jane Tylus for generously commenting on the earliest version of this chapter. Special thanks to William J. Kennedy for inviting me to speak at Cornell University’s Renaissance Colloquium in September 2013 where I was able to workshop my near-final draft. Of those present that evening, I would especially like to thank Stuart A. Davis, Kathleen Long, Marilyn Migiel, John M. Najemy, and, of course, William J. Kennedy for their critical feedback and lively engagement with my project.

1 For an analysis of Capellanus’s participation in the discourse of medieval misogyny see R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991). For a feminist critique of the courtly love tradition, as well as an overview of current critical approaches, see E. Jane Burns, “Courtly Love; Who Needs It? Recent Feminist Work in the Medieval French Tradition,” Signs 27.1 (Autumn 2001): 23–57.

2 For the figure of the female magistra in Capellanus’s De Amore see John F. Benton, “The Court of Champagne as a Literary Center,” Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies 36.4 (1961): 551–9; and Helen Solterer, The Master and Minerva: Disputing Women in French Medieval Culture (Berkeley: U of California P, 1995).

© 2015From Unn Falkeid and Aileen A. Feng (eds), Rethinking Gaspara Stampa in the Canon of Renaissance

Poetry, published by Ashgate Publishing. See: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472427069



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Rethinking Gaspara Stampa in the Canon of Renaissance Poetry76

against the female sex.3 Underlying the myriad negative portrayals of women in the final book of the treatise is Capellanus’s maxim that every woman is “invida et aliarum maledica” (envious and a slanderer of other women; 201), a universal characteristic he explains matter-of-factly:

That every woman is envious [invida] is also found to be a general rule, because a woman is always consumed with jealousy [zelo] over another woman’s beauty, and she loses all pleasure in what she has … It is not easy to find a woman whose tongue can ever spare anybody or who can keep from words of detraction. Every woman thinks that by running down others she adds to her own praise and increases her own reputation—a fact which shows clearly to everybody that women have very little sense.4

On its most basic level, invidia (envy) designates the feeling of ill-will that arises from the contemplation of superior advantages possessed by another. When applied specifically to women, as in this passage, it has often been used by male authors to explain the “natural” inclination towards a form of female rivalry that prevents women from being either trustworthy or rational. The trope of female invidia is one of the most recurrent and recognizable themes in early modern

3 Capellanus’s sudden reversal of opinion in the third book has long puzzled scholars, most of whom tend to fall into two camps: those who focus on (1) the problem of irony (see D.W. Robertson, Jr., “The Doctrine of Charity in Mediaeval Literary Gardens: A Topical Approach through Symbolism and Allegory,” Speculum 26 [1951]: 24–49; R.J. Schoeck, “Andreas Capellanus and St. Bernard of Clairvaux: The Twelve Rules of Love and the Twelve Steps of Humility,” Modern Language Notes 66 [1951]: 295–300; Christopher Kertesz, “The De arte (honeste) amandi of Andreas Capellanus,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 13 [1971–1972]: 5–16; and more recently, Paolo Cherchi, Andreas and the Ambiguity of Courtly Love [Toronto: Toronto UP, 1994]), and (2) whether or not the treatise ultimately promotes courtly or spiritual love (see Joan M. Ferrante, “The Bible as Thesaurus for Secular Literature,” The Bible in the Middle Ages, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 89, ed. Bernard S. Levy [Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York, 1992]; Rhonda L. McDaniel, “‘None too Sincere’: Andreas Capellanus, the Bible, and De Amore,” Medieval Perspectives 18 [2003]: 175–92). Don Monson, however, has argued that vernacular literary scholars have historically misread the Latin treatise, which should be read in light of scholasticism, with attention paid more to the organizing principles and form of the text, rather than to authorial intent (Andreas Capellanus, Scholasticism, and the Courtly Tradition [Washington, DC: Catholic U of America P, 2005]).

4 “[73] Invida quoque mulier omnis generali regula invenitur, quia semper mulier in alterius feminae pulchritudine zelo consumitur et rerum felicitate privatur … [75] … Nec enim facile posset femina reperiri, cuius unquam noverit parcere lingua vel detractionis verba tacere . [76] Et in hoc mulier omnis suas per omnes credit attollere laudes et propriam accrescere famam, si aliarum insistat laudibus derogare, quae res manifeste cunctis demonstrat modicum in mulieribus dogma vigere [76].” Latin text taken from: http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/capellanus.html; English translations are taken from The Art of Courtly Love, trans. John Jay Parry (New York: Columbia UP, 1960), p. 202.

Copyright material: You are not permitted to transmit this file in any format or media; it may not be resold or reused without prior agreement with Ashgate Publishing and

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Desiring Subjects 77

literary depictions of women, a characteristic attributed to the female sex as a way of explaining women’s natural inferiority.

Within Capellanus’s “general rule” we encounter a secondary characteristic of women that is often associated with female invidia—zelus (jealousy), an emotion fueled by the fear of losing an object to a rival. Although in the passage female jealousy appears to be directed at another woman’s beauty, the root of zelus would suggest that the object of the rivalry is a love interest.5 That is, zelus is etymologically related to zelo, -are (to love ardently), connoting a direct relation between the emotion of jealousy and love. This is further supported by Capellanus’s claim that this feeling of envy and jealousy forces women to lose pleasure in the objects they already possess. Thus, at the foundation of the trope of female invidia, and by extension, female interactions, is a rivalry for male love objects. The simultaneous fear of losing him, while coveting the one possessed by another woman, is the impetus behind women deriding one another.

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. Moreover, the trope of invidia was not even restricted to writing by men. Surprisingly, we encounter a version of the trope in the Latin letters written by the first generation of women writers in Quattrocento Italy. 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.6 In the form of a humanist invective, she decries “these mindless women—these female counselors who emerge victorious from the cookshop jar after a prodigious vote among the neighbors—hunt down with their bilious poison those women who rise to greater distinction than they.”7 As we see here, invidia is presented as a negative trait specific to uneducated women, rather than something universal to the female sex. Cereta echoes Capellanus’s conclusion that “women have very little sense,” when she calls uneducated women “mindless” (mentis impotes), and then underscores their lack of sense by attributing professional labels to their frivolous daily activities: female gossips are

5 For an analysis of the different manifestations of jealousy in Stampa’s Rime see Ann Rosalind Jones’s chapter in this volume.

6 To date, the most comprehensive biography of Laura Cereta is Diana Robin’s Introduction to Laura Cereta. Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997). For an examination of Cereta’s critique of marriage from the fraught position of spouse and humanist see Amyrose McCue Gill, “Fraught Relations in the Letters of Laura Cereta: Marriage, Friendship, and Humanist Epistolarity,” Renaissance Quarterly 62 (2009): 1098–129.

7 “hæ mentis impotes, & inter vicinas ex vrnulâ popinali consultrices numerosissimis suffragiís extractæ, mox illas, si quæ surgunt insigniùs, indagantur aconito liuoris occidere” (Epistolae. iam primum e m[anu]s[criptis] in lucem productae a Iacobo Philippo Tomasino, qui eius vitam et notas addidit, ed. Giacomo Filippo Tomasini [Padua: Sardi, 1640], p. 54). A digital reproduction of 1640 edition is available at http://www.uni-mannheim.de/mateo/desbillons/cereta.html; English translation by Diana Robin, Collected Letters, pp. 122–5.





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referred to as “counselors” (consultrices) whose victories occur not in court but in the domestic space of the kitchen, and whose judgments about other women as referred to as “votes” (sufragiís). Cereta’s description of female invidia in uneducated women centers around their perception of her intellectual superiority, a kind of rivalry that only a century before would have been confined to the male sphere, before the advent of female education and writing.8

In separating herself from the “mindless women,” whose envious gossip is compared to poison,9 Cereta recalls traits of Ovid’s Invidia, particularly when she writes that “they would gnaw away at themselves [roduntur], if they didn’t feast [rodant] in their slanderous talk of others.”10 Cereta’s repetition of rodo (to gnaw), used both actively (rodant; against other women) and passively (roduntur; against themselves), echoes the encounter between Minerva and Invidia in Metamorphosis 2.781–2 where we see the same treatment of carpo (to gnaw) in Ovid’s description of Invidia: “Gnawing at others [carpit], and being gnawed [carpitur], she was herself her own torment [supplicium].”11 Cereta’s appropriation of the Ovidian encounter between Minerva, goddess of wisdom, and Invidia, personification of envy, restages the classical rivalry between wisdom and envy in a contemporary context that witnessed the emergence of two distinct classes of women. By attributing female invidia and a natural inclination to slander other women only to uneducated women, she both reinforces the trope Capellanus instantiated and separates educated women from the rest of their sex. Whereas Capellanus finds female invidia to be inherent in all women, Cereta argues that female education and intellectual drive may allow women to overcome their natural inclination towards invidia, to metamorphose from Ovid’s Invidia into Minerva.

The case of Laura Cereta illustrates how, for the early generations of women writers, confronting medieval depictions of women was a delicate balancing act. On the one hand, by recalling misogynist tropes, early female writers like Cereta could at once praise educated women for their ability to transcend the behavior of ordinary women and chastise uneducated women both for idleness and their envious slander of more accomplished women. However, such an appropriation of the invidia trope also implicitly reinforces this negative and essentializing portrayal of women in their “natural state.” In discussing the state of contemporary women, Cereta confronted a long tradition of literary depictions of women and raised

8 For scholarship on female education see the Editors’ Introduction to this volume.9 The image of female tongue emitting poison recalls Giotto’s fresco L’Invidia (c.

1306)—part of the cycle depicting the seven virtues and vices in the Paduan Capella degli Scrovigni. In that image, Invidia is presented as an old woman whose tongue is transformed into a snake and turns against her, attacking her eyes. My sincerest thanks go to Unn Falkeid for leading me to this fresco.

10 “ni loquaciùs rodant alios, ipsae intro mutæ roduntur” (Collected Letters, p. 82); My sincerest thanks to Kathleen Long for directing me back to Ovid as a possible subtext for Cereta’s portrayal of Invidia.

11 “carpitque et carpitur una / suppliciumque suum est”; Latin citations and English translation are taken from Ovid, Metamorphoses, vol. III, trans. Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004), p. 115.





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two important problems for women writers: first, if she accuses other women of invidia, she might be seen as tacitly endorsing Capellanus’s position; second, if she accuses other women of invidia, tearing them down, could that act not itself be seen as an instance of invidia, a tactic of raising herself up in estimation by putting down the women around her?

It is neither Capellanus nor Cereta, but rather Gaspara Stampa whose poetry helps us account for and better understand women’s use of the trope of invidia. Beginning with the intrusion of a second, female voice—that of “qualch’una”—in the tercets of the opening sonnet, Stampa’s poetry presents both her desire for the male beloved and her poetic inspiration as mediated by the invidia of a second woman who hopes to emulate her. Stampa, thus, incorporates the theme of female invidia through the use of a speaking female rival in her collection of poetry in such a way that generates a structure of triangular, mimetic desire that may be mapped to terms usually associated with René Girard’s reading of the novel genre.12 The desire of the anonymous woman is provoked by, and borrowed from, Stampa—she wants to walk “à paro” (side by side) with the poet. Within the subject-mediator-object structure, Stampa is as drawn to the female rival as she is to the object of her desire. She wants to evoke invidia in other women, to have other women desire to be her, to possess both her beloved and her poetic talents. This explicit inclusion of a female rival places Stampa’s poetry within a larger tradition of literary depictions of women: by presenting invidia as a positive and integral component to poeticizing, Gaspara Stampa challenges the classical trope as a destructive attribute that prohibits women from being trustworthy or intelligent. Examining a series of triangular paradigms within the collection elucidates not only a shifting perspective on the nature of desire, but also the role of female-homosocial bonding13 in the emerging early modern female lyric

12 René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1961). In adapting Girard’s theoretical framework to Stampa’s poetry, I am also challenging his assertion of symmetry within the triangular structure, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick does in her reading of the Victorian novel (Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire [New York: Columbia UP, 1985]. See especially chapter 1, “Gender Asymmetry and Erotic Triangles,” pp. 21–7). That is, the distribution of power between the two rivals and the beloved within the triangle is not symmetrical (equal), and in the case of Gaspara Stampa’s Rime, gender especially disrupts the Platonic symmetry that defines Girard’s schemata.

13 My use of the term female-homosocial bonding is adapted from Eve Sedgwick’s theory concerning male homosociality (Between Men; see especially Introduction, part I, “Homosocial Desire,” pp. 1–5). In the same way that men may have intense, nonsexual bonds with other men, using women as a means through which they express this bond, Stampa’s triangular structure of desire in her poetry provides a male beloved as the conduit between Stampa and the female rival(s) in the formation of female homosociality. In this chapter, I use female homosociality to refer to same-sex relations between women of a nonsexual nature (friendship, mentorship, etc.), without engaging with the issue concerning the continuum between homosexual and homosocial that informs Sedgwick’s analysis.





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tradition. Stampa’s model of desire and poetic production emerges from her negotiation of two distinct frames of reference: her mimetic paradigm responds to classical assumptions made about women and encoded within the dominant literary discourses of early modern Europe. Rather than deny the existence of female invidia, she embraces and recodes it as a positive and productive attribute of female homosociality.

***

The opening verse of Stampa’s first sonnet is a clear echo of Petrarch’s famous incipit, and reveals a studied and thoughtful engagement with his first sonnet. “Voi ch’ascoltate in queste meste rime” (“You who hear in these troubled rhymes”), she writes, replacing Petrarch’s rime sparse (RVF 1, 1: “scattered rhymes”) with a phrase that symbolizes his emotional state: troubled.14 Her imitation of the Petrarchan style is exemplary of the theory of imitation Petrarch expounded in his Latin collection of letters, the Familiares:15 it resembles the original, though is not a replica, like the relationship of a son to his father. Stampa’s diversion from her Petrarchan model begins as early as the opening verse and continues through the quatrains. She challenges her predecessor’s paradigm of desire by not professing herself a different woman than before, nor describing her love as a Petrarchan “youthful error” through religious notions of shame and repentance.16 Where Petrarch hopes to find “pietà” (pity) and “perdono” (forgiveness) from his readers and, ultimately, God, Stampa, in perhaps one of her most Petrarchan of moments, seeks “gloria, non che perdon” (v. 6: “glory and not only pardon”). “Gloria,” that slippery term which characterizes Petrarch’s crisis atop Mont Ventoux:17 glory in the Christian afterlife, but also earthly fame. In his reading of RVF 1, V. Stanley Benfell has argued that although the poet yearns for a “new

14 All texts and translation of Stampa’s Rime are taken from Gaspara Stampa, The Complete Poems: The 1554 Edition of the “Rime,” A Bilingual Edition, ed. Troy Tower and Jane Tylus, with translation and introduction by Jane Tylus (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010).

15 See especially Familiares I, 8; XXII, 2; and XXIII, 19 (Francisci Petrarcae Epistolae de rebus familiaribus et variaea, ed. Giuseppe Fracassetti [Firenze: Le Monnier, 1859–1863]; Rerum familiarium libri, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo [Albany: State U of New York P, 1975]). In addition to the father-son analogy, Petrarch also adapts Seneca’s apian metaphor in his imitations theory: a good poet (bee) culls material from other poets (flowers) and produces something unique (honey).

16 Patricia Phillippy argues that poems 286–91 replace Petrarch’s penitential model “with a gesture toward feminine community which is directly indebted to the model of Ovid’s heroines” (“Gaspara Stampa’s Rime: Replication and Retraction,” Philological Quarterly 68:1 [Winter 1989]: 1–23; p. 7). See also Veronica Andreani’s chapter in this volume.

17 Familiares IV, 1.





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fashioning of the self” through Augustinian conversion, he is unable to attain it and, thus, the collection of scattered rhymes represent a series of partial turnings or conversions, all of which is dramatized in the Secretum.18 With the exception of the term “perdono,” religious rhetoric is wholly lacking in Stampa’s first poem, thus the reader privileges the connotation of earthly fame, much sought after by Petrarch, but always masked by the laurel. As Gordon Braden has noted, Stampa’s removal of the quintessential markers of Petrarchan moral unease in this poem served as a critique of Petrarch’s “diffidence about his own ambition.”19 Yet even in light of the radical changes she makes to the Petrarchan conceits emblematized in his first sonnet, as readers we are unprepared for what we encounter in the tercets: the unexpected, almost jarring, intrusion of a second woman’s voice—that of “qualch’una” (some woman), a female rival for the affection of her beloved. Stampa writes (Rime 1, 9–14):

E spero ancor, che debba dir qualch’una,felicissima lei, da che sostenneper sì chiara cagion danno sì chiaro.

Deh, perche tant’Amor, tanta Fortunaper sì nobil Signor’ à me non venne,ch’anch’io n’andrei con tanta Donna à paro?

(And I hope some woman will be moved to say: / “Most happy she, who suffered famously / for such a famous cause! // Oh, why can’t the fortune that comes / from loving a lord like him be mine, / so such a lady and I might walk side by side?”)

In addition to “gloria” and “perdono,” Stampa hopes her rhymes will elicit envy from an anonymous woman (“qualch’una”). The anonymous woman verbalizes her desire to be like Stampa, to reap the benefits of loving such a man, to have the same “fortuna” (fortune). The poet invites the gaze of another woman, and

18 V. Stanley Benfell, “Translating Petrarchan Desire in Vittoria Colonna and Gaspara Stampa,” Translating Desire in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. Craig A. Berry and Heather R. Hayton (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005), pp. 109–31; see especially pp. 112–15. For a comparative analysis of Gregory the Great’s consolatory dialogues on Petrarch’s Secretum see David Marsh, “The Burning Question: Crisis and Cosmology in the Secret (Secretum),” Petrarch. A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, ed. Armando Maggi and Victoria Kirkham (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009), pp. 211–17. For an analysis of Petrarch’s preoccupation with the themes of love and penitence in both the Psalmi penitentiales and Secretum, see E. Ann Matter, “Petrarch’s Personal Psalms (Psalmi penitentiales),” Petrarch. A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, ed. Armando Maggi and Victoria Kirkham (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009), pp. 219–27.

19 Gordon Braden, “Gaspara Stampa and the Gender of Petrarchism,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 38.2, “Revising Renaissance Eroticism” (Summer 1996): 115–39; p. 122.





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welcomes her subsequent invidia, placing her in the position of a rival. That the poet desires this and explicitly proclaims it as a goal of her poetry, presents female invidia in a positive light, and an integral component to Stampa’s poetic process. She embraces being the subject of another woman’s conversation, and seeks it out with her poems. This is in stark contrast to Petrarch’s famous lament in RVF 1 for having become a “favola” (gossip) in the mouths of the people: “Ma ben veggio or sì come al popol tutto / favola fui gran tempo, onde sovente / di me medesmo meco mi vergogno” (vv. 9–11: “But now I see well how for a long time I was the talk of the crowd, for which often I am ashamed of myself within”).20 Petrarch’s shame, and the turn inward symbolized in the verse “me medesmo meco mi vergogno” (“I am ashamed of myself within”), is dismissed in Stampa’s tercets where she writes her own “favola” and has it spoken by the female rival. Thus, the envy of the female rival fuels the poetic process, and, by extension, increases Stampa’s desire for her beloved in the public recognition of his uniqueness.

The rivalry between the two women is not as simple as competing for the same love object, however. The image presented in the final tercet is striking: the anonymous woman desires to walk alongside Stampa (v. 14: “Ch’anch’io n’andrei con tanta Donna à paro”). On the one hand, walking side-by-side with the poet reinforces the anonymous woman’s desire to have the same status as Stampa-lover; to love like she loves. On the other, the metapoetic tenor of the verse cannot be discounted. In the introduction to her translation, as well as her chapter in this volume, Jane Tylus has noted that Stampa’s use of “andare … à paro” is an allusion to Petrarch’s depiction of Sappho in the Triumphus Cupidinis 4.25–6: “una giovene greca a paro a paro / coi nobili poeti ivi cantando / et avea un suo stile soave e raro” (“a young Greek girl went singing alongside the noblest of poets, and her style was mellifluous and rare”).21 In Tylus’s reading, Stampa’s citation of these verses, ventriloquized by the anonymous woman, is a displacement of her desire to equal the ancients. I would instead argue that Stampa’s citation is self-referential, and that the use of this expression opens up a space for contemporary poetry and poetic rivalry in a way that Petrarch refuted, but that Dante had embraced a generation earlier. For Petrarch, there was no contemporary rival competing for the attention

20 English translations of Petrarch’s poems are from Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime sparse and Other Lyrics, trans. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1979), p. 36.

21 Tylus, “Volume Editor’s Introduction,” The Complete Poems, p. 21 (see also p. 366 n. 36). Petrarch, Triumphus Cupidinis, Trionfi, ed. Marco Ariani (Milan: Mursia, 1988), pp. 173–147. Petrarch’s Triumphi has not received the same amount of critical attention as his other works, but worth noting are Maria Cecilia Bertolani, Il corpo glorioso: Studi sui Trionfi del Petrarca (Rome: Carocci, 2001); Konrad Eisenbichler and Amilcare Iannucci, eds., Petrarch’s Triumphs: Allegory and Spectacle (Toronto: Dovehouse, 1990); Claudio Giunta, “Memoria di Dante nei Trionfi,” Rivista di Letteratura Italiana 11 (1993): 411–52; Fabio Finotti, “The Poem of Memory (Triumphi),” Petrarch. A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, ed. Armando Maggi and Victoria Kirkham (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009), pp. 63–83.





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of Laura,22 and poetic rivalry was between the modern poet (himself) and the ancients. In the Triumphi, Sappho might walk alongside the noble poets of the past, but in his poetry Petrarch figures himself as following in their footsteps while trying to forge his own path:

Solo e pensoso i piú deserti campivo misurando a passi tardi et lenti,et gli occhi porto per fuggire intentiove vestigio human l’arena stampa. (RVF 35, 1–4)

(Alone and filled with care, I go measuring the most deserted fields with steps delaying and slow, and I keep my eyes alert so as to flee from where any human footprint marks the sand.)

The metapoetic tension of this poem mirrors the father-son analogy in Fam. XXIII, 19, the cornerstone of Petrarch’s imitation theory, wherein a good imitator’s work resembles that of the original, like a son to his father.23 Petrarch continually figures himself as the inheritor of a tradition. This is most evident in RVF 70 where he creates a modern lineage of vernacular poets by including in each stanza of the canzone a verse from Arnault Daniel, Guido Cavalcanti, Dante, Cino da Pistoia, and, finally, himself. The explicit citation of his predecessors simultaneously acknowledges their accomplishments in vernacular poetry while also setting Petrarch apart from them.

Stampa, however, places herself into the position normally reserved for the ancients, and idealizes a possible rival, making her poetry more concerned with opening and beginning a poetic tradition, rather than—as Petrarch’s habit of drawing himself at the end of a long lineage of classical poets shows—closing it

22 The only version of amatory rivalry in Petrarch’s œuvre is the tension between sacred and profane love within the poet. He figures himself as torn between his love for God and his love for Laura, but never figures Laura as being embroiled in the same crisis (whereby his rival for Laura’s love would be God). For the conflict between sacred and profane love see especially Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, Petrarch’s Genius. Pentimento and Prophecy (Berkeley: U of California P, 1991); Pierre Blanc, “Petrarca ou la poétique de l’ego : Éléments de psychopoétique pétrarquienne,” Revue des Études Italiennes 29 (1983): 124–69; John Freccero, “The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch’s Poetics,” Diacritics 5 (1975): 34–40; Nicolae Iliescu, Il “Canzoniere” petrarchesco e Sant’Agostino (Rome: Società Accademica Romana, 1962); Kenelm Foster, “Beatrice or Medusa: The Penitential Element in Petrarch’s Canzoniere,” Italian Studies presented to E.R. Vincent, ed. C.P. Brand, K. Foster, and U. Limentani (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, Ltd, 1962), pp. 41–56.

23 My reading of this letter is in line with Ignacio Enrique Navarette who emphasizes that “while the possibility of deviating from the prototype offers some comfort, the analogy between model and father, and imitation and son, suggests that the model poet engenders the imitator, and this relationship of direct dependency is closer to medieval notions of midgets on the shoulders of giants than to the humanist hermeneutic” (Orphans of Petrarch: Poetry and Theory in the Spanish Renaissance [Los Angeles: U of California P, 1994], p.10).





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out. By ventriloquizing the female rival’s desire to “andare à paro” (“walk side by side”) with her, Stampa provides herself, not the ancients, as the (new) exemplary model, a move much more reminiscent of Dante’s use of the expression in the Commedia than Petrarch’s. In Purgatorio XXIV, scholars have long noted the metapoetic significance of Dante-pilgrim’s encounter with Forese Donati, who identifies Dante in reference to his poetry when he asks, “Ma dì s’i’ veggio qui colui che fore / trasse le nove rime, cominciando: ‘Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore’” (vv. 49–51: “But tell me if I see here the one who drew / forth the new rhymes, beginning, ‘Ladies who / have intellect of love’?”).24 Forese will later call these new rhymes the dolce stil novo (v. 57: “sweet new style”), and will present himself, and his fellow Duecento poets “’l Notaro e Guittone” (v. 56: “Giacomo da Lentini and Guittone d’Arezzo”) as closing out the tradition directly preceding Dante’s new Italian poetic movement. Forese’s authorization of the “sweet new style” is given a competitive tenor when he tells Dante-pilgrim, “Tu ti rimani omai, ché ‘l tempo è caro / in questo regno, sì ch’io perdo troppo / venendo teco sì a paro a paro” (vv. 93–5: “You stay behind now, for time is precious in / this realm, and I lose too much coming along / side by side with you”). Thus, in Purgatorio XXIV we see two poets—each representing a different phase of Italian poetry—walking side by side conversing about poetry until the earlier-generation Duecento poet Forese can no longer linger. In this presentation of poetic rivalry, Forese leaves Dante, allowing him to forge his own path. I would argue that this Dantean moment has much to offer Stampa’s first poem, where the image of two women walking side by side symbolizes poetic rivalry.

The role of the second woman (rival) as a mediator for the desire for both the beloved and poetic fame thus collapses the two negative traits generally associated with female invidia: the rival’s desire for Stampa’s beloved increases her own longings for him, while the rival’s envy of her poetic accomplishments augments her desire to succeed intellectually. Female invidia becomes the foundation of a new community of female poets, a form of rivalry that ameliorates, rather than destroys, the women involved. Stampa seeks out this new community in Sonnet 16 where, after boasting of the new hourly joys she discovers with her lover, she describes two hoped-for results from her newfound pleasure: the words to describe her experience to other poets, and the envy of women. First, she turns her attention to a community of intellectuals:

Così vorrei haver concetti e detti,E parole à tant’opra appropriate;sì che fosser da me scritte e cantate,E fatte conte à mille alti intelletti. (5–8)

24 References to Dante’s Purgatorio, and the English translations, are taken from Robert M. Durling and Ronald L. Martinez, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Purgatorio (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003), p. 403.





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(I’d like to find the saying and conceits / the words to fit the work so I might / write them down and sing them, and have / a thousand learned intellects take note.)

Stampa’s preoccupation with finding the right “sayings and conceits” to describe her delights pays homage to the practice of poetic exchange, and presents her as part of a larger poetic community. In this sense, her poetic process appears more akin to what we encounter in Dante’s Vita nova —each time he documents his feelings for Beatrice in a poem, he sends the poem to his community of friends for their commentary.25 Stampa privileges communication with other intellectuals, hoping they will “take note” of her poetry; an echo of her desire to attain “gloria” in the first sonnet. She simultaneously hopes that other women will be consumed with envy when they hear of her pleasure:

Et udissero l’altre, che verranno,Con quanta invidia lor sia gita alteraDe l’amoroso mio felice danno. (9–11)

(along with all those women who someday / will be filled with such envy when they hear how proud / I went around, rejoicing in my amorous pain.) (translation amended)26

If we consider the Petrarchan oxymoron “amoroso … danno” (amorous pain) juxtaposed with Stampa’s admission of happiness (she is “felice”), we see the delights described in the first quatrain are not regretted in the end, nor are they a source of shame. Her earthly delight is not a fleeting moment, the “breve sogno” (RVF 1, 14: “brief dream”) of Petrarch’s opening sonnet. Rather, it lives on in the envy of other women—most importantly, future women—a notion that seems to increase her desire to relive the moments with the beloved through her poetry. Documenting her pleasure in rhyme is not just for herself, it is not a way for her to shun the outside world in favor of an interior space of memory and self-reflection, as Petrarch so often does in his poetry. Instead, her internal desire is mediated by the external envy of another woman. She wants other intellectuals to take note, but she also wants other women to take note. By combining the desire for poetic fame, which depends upon an intellectual audience, with the desire for a woman’s attention, Stampa is able to figure the ubiquitous intellectual woman reader, generating as an ideal what Cereta and Capellanus thought was an impossibility in fact.

Although in these two poems Stampa seeks out the attention of other women—presenting female invidia as fuel for her poetic process, and as an assurance of

25 Dante, Vita nova, ed. Manuela Colombo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1999). For the figure of Beatrice in the Vita nova see Robert Hollander, “‘Vita Nuova’: Dante’s Perceptions of Beatrice,” Dante Studies 92 (1974): 1–18; Heather Webb, “Dante’s Stone Cold Rhymes,” Dante Studies 121 (2003): 149–68 (see especially pp. 150–52).

26 Tylus colloquially translates “con quanta invidia lor sia” as “they will die of envy.”





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her future glory—she does acknowledge the potential danger of the female rival. If we consider the paradigm she has established—she invites other women to gaze upon her beloved, invites them to witness her pleasure through her poetry, hoping they will envy her and desire her beloved—then the inevitable outcome is that eventually the female rival will become her beloved’s lover, and she, herself, the rival. Stampa’s repositioning within the triangular structure of desire she has created begs the question of what this change in status would do to her poetic process. That is, if she were to become the female rival, would her invidia of another woman also serve as poetic inspiration? Stampa addresses this possibility, and elucidates what this might mean for her poetics in poem 171 through the repetition of the verb torre (togliere; to take away or deprive):

Voi potete Signor ben tormi voiCon quel cor d’indurato diamante,E farvi d’altra Donna novo amante;Di che cosa non è, che più m’annoi.

Ma non potete già ritormi poi,L’imagin vostra, il vostro almo sembiante,Che giorno e notte mi stà sempre innante,Poi che mi fece Amor de’ servi suoi.

Non potete ritormi quei desiri,Che m’acceser di voi sì caldamenteIl foco, il pianto, che per gli occhi verso. (1–11; emphasis added)

(True, you might turn away from me, my lord, / with that heart of obdurate diamond / and take another woman as your lover— / nothing in the world could hurt me more— // but you can never take away from me / your image, that lofty semblance of yourself / which day and night is always here before me. Since Love placed me among his servants. // You can’t deprive me of these desires / for you that burn so—along with the fire / and tears I pour forth through these eyes.)

That she could lose her beloved to another woman is presented as a distinct possibility in the first quatrain where she acknowledges his power to turn away from her. The issue of agency is an important one here, since Stampa attributes her loss to the beloved actively leaving her, rather than being taken from her by another woman. The pain of knowing her beloved has taken a new lover and the jealousy this evokes in her is tempered by the beloved’s inability to reclaim his own image from her—one of her sources of inspiration. Thus, the idea of a fleeting physical love implied in the apparent replaceability of Stampa underscores the permanence of her memories, and her ability to memorialize their love. Although losing her beloved to another woman would pain her, it would not diminish her poetic aspirations or ability to write. In retrospect, the opening verse, “Voi potete Signor ben tormi” (v. 1: “True, you might turn away from me, my lord”) signals a power struggle between the poet and her beloved. Initially, Stampa appears





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in a passive position, powerless to the decisions made by her beloved, but the repetition of “non potete ritormi” (v. 9: “you cannot take from me”) in the second quatrain and first tercet renders the beloved less in control of his destiny than would first appear: he can take other women as lovers, and take himself away from Stampa, but he cannot take control of his own poetic figuration. She emphasizes her power by inscribing herself as a slave, not to the beloved, but to something higher and immutable—the God of Love—which, as Veronica Andreani analyzes in her chapter in this volume, makes it possible for her to find a new lover. Thus, although he can physically deny himself to her, and offer himself to another lover, his image belongs to her and will remain with her.

Although the basic idea of the poet possessing the beloved’s image is not novel to Petrarchan-inspired poetry—remember that Petrarch claims to carry Laura’s image in his heart, as a constant source of inspiration27—Stampa’s claim to the beloved’s image takes a particularly sinister turn in Rime 94 where she warns her beloved about the dangers to his reputation that another woman could bring him. After a long string of battle metaphors in the quatrains, Stampa warns her beloved:

Guardate, che la fama de le tanteVostre vittorie, poi non renda oscuraSignor quest’una sola e non ammante.

Io per me stimerei mia gran venturaL’esser veduta al vostro carro innante;Ma voi del vostro honor habiate cura. (9–14)

(Be careful, lord, that this woman alone / doesn’t cover up or darken the fame / that you’ve gained from your many victories, // As for myself, it would be my great fortune / to be seen leading your triumphal carriage, / but you should be mindful of your honor.)

Stampa positions herself here as the female rival and writer, warning her beloved that the love of an unworthy woman could lead Stampa to darken his fame and the way he will be remembered.28 Her desire to lead his triumphal carriage

27 RVF 96. In Stampa’s rewriting of this sonnet, she described her beloved’s picture as “un pocchetto incostante e disdegnoso” (Rime 57, 14).

28 Janet Smarr makes a good point about this poem: “These accusations [of his disloyalty to her], however, offer no real threat to his reputation, as they would were similar accusations of deceitful inconstancy and lightness published against a woman. Such reproaches can be made to a man without his detriment, especially as her inferior status and his pursuit of public honor have already given him a good excuse” (“Substituting for Laura: Objects of Desire for Renaissance Women Poets,” Comparative Literature Studies 38.1 [2001]: 1–30; pp. 17–18). But, particularly in this poem, Stampa equates her position as love poet with that of an epic poet.





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evokes the epic genre, rather than the love lyric.29 She inscribes herself as a Vergil, the poet of the Republic given the task of immortalizing the Augustan regime, or the Petrarch of his Latin epic Africa, an endeavor aimed at immortalizing Petrarch as much as the epic hero Scipio Africanus, and the epic’s dedicatee, King Robert of Naples. Stampa privileges her ability to properly memorialize her beloved over physical acts of love with the other woman in the veiled threat that closes the sonnet: “ma voi del vostro honor habiate cura” (v. 14: “you should be mindful of your honor”). If Stampa is able to face the truth about the possibility that she could be replaced by another woman, so too must the beloved recognize the negative consequences to his public persona of taking a different lover. Stampa can assure him the good kind of fame—the kind associated with triumphal processions—but the same cannot be said of other women.30 Although the presence of a female rival is integral to her poetic process, she still warns her beloved of the dangers to his reputation in indulging this rivalry between women, and repositioning her as rival, rather than lover, within the triangular structure of desire. The foundation of the threat is that although he could deny her his love, female poet-lovers control his image, and his destiny.

Stampa’s ruminations on desire in this poem reinforce the paradigm established in the opening sonnet, where the figure of the female rival is first introduced. The traditional Petrarchan theme of unrequited love later imitated in sixteenth-century canzonieri is more fully developed and complicated in Stampa’s portrayal of triangular desire and rivalry. And, most importantly, it is gendered female. Within the economy of her collection, the triangular model she describes does not appear universal or adaptable to men desiring female beloveds; rather, it is specific to women occupying both the position of lover-poet and rival. Stampa seems to recognize the uniqueness of the female-female-male triangular structure in her rendition of unrequited love in Rime 43. Here, we see that other men’s desire for her does not elicit desire or jealousy in her beloved:

29 The entire sonnet is couched in military terms. Stampa compares dishonor in battle to choosing the wrong beloved—both sets of errors can destroy the beloved’s reputation. The reference to the “carro,” then, follows the theme established in the quatrains. In conflating the figures of the love and epic poets, she gives a place to women in a political tradition (epic) that marginalized them.

30 The threat is particularly poignant in the case of Count Collaltino di Collalto, whose military career often kept him from Stampa. Ann Rosalind Jones provides an important insight into the male public image and women’s use of the pastoral to challenge it when she writes, “Stampa and [Mary] Wroth use pastoral conventions to argue that men’s public roles belong to an impure, combative realm that disguises masculine callousness as duty and permits injustice to continue unchecked. In contrast they represent women’s fidelity in love as heroic virtue. Under its surface of simplicity and pathos, feminine pastoral questions masculine power and established a vigorous virtue for the woman who writes” (The Currency of Eros. Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620 [Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1990], p. 125).





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Dura è la stella mia, maggior durezzaE‘ quella del mio Conte; egli mi fugge,I seguo lui; altri per me si strugge,I non posso mirar’ altra bellezza.

Odio chi m’ama, & amo che mi sprezza.Verso chi m’è humile il mio cor rugge;I son’ humil con chimia speme adhugge;Aˋ cosi stranio cibo ho l’alma avezza. (1–8)

(My destiny is harsh, but harsher still / is that of my lord: I follow him, he flees; / other men consume themselves for me, / while I can’t look on any other beauty. // I hate the man who loves me, love him who scorns me; / my heart protests the man who’s meek, / while I submit to him who dampens hope: / to such unusual tastes my soul is suited.)

In the first quatrain Stampa initially gestures at the model of unrequited love to which readers of Petrarch and his later imitators are accustomed: like Apollo chasing Daphne, the poet-lover is destined to pursue a beloved who holds him/her in disdain. Yet the poet and beloved are not alone in the chase, as we see in verses 2–3 where Stampa describes herself as desired by other men, but destined to follow only the one who flees from her. On the surface, it would appear that Stampa is reinforcing the Petrarchan paradigm of unrequited love by presenting a double example—her beloved flees from her, just as she flees from other men. Indeed, she opens the second quatrain stating that, “Odio chi m’ama, & amo che mi sprezza” (v. 5: “I hate the man who loves me, love him who scorns me”). However, if we read this sonnet, and the introduction of a male rival to her beloved, against the first sonnet, we see a similar triangular structure of desire, but one that fails to elicit the desired end. That is, whereas in Rime 1 the presence of a female rival increases Stampa’s desire for her male beloved, here, the presence of multiple male rivals does not elicit jealousy or increased desire in her male beloved; on the contrary, he continues to flee from her, removing the mimetic aspect of the structure that opened the collection. Within the economy of Stampa’s collection, male rivalry, it would seem, does not function in the same manner as female rivalry, making the triangular paradigm of desire and envy particular to women writers.

***

By gendering female her structure of triangular desire (female-female-male) Stampa makes her poetry as much about the art of female poetry as about desire. At first glance, this model of desire nuances the more traditional model of unrequited love by introducing a rival for the beloved’s attention, but upon closer examination we see that the new paradigm in Stampa’s poetry is not universal among the sexes; rather, it is specific to women. By including a female rival in her collection, she incorporates and counters the classically misogynist tropes that





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I addressed at the onset of this chapter. Andrea Capellanus’s oft-repeated maxim that a woman is naturally “envious and a slanderer of other women” (201) is altered and overturned by the figure of Stampa’s female rival whose envy does not culminate in slander, but rather in emulation. The reputation at risk is neither Stampa’s nor the female rival’s but that of the male beloved who must safeguard his public image by loving the woman who could increase his fame. This positive portrayal of female invidia is what makes Stampa’s triangular model so unique; the anonymous female rival’s desire to walk “à paro” with the poet removes the negative connotations previously associated with female rivalry. Appropriating and revising the classically misogynist trope of female invidia, Stampa is able to open up a model of female authorship and readership that could thrive on the very energies of female envy that had traditionally been listed as a cause of female inferiority.

By taking the misogynist assertion of female invidia and appropriating it into a model of female homosociality, Stampa imagines a community of female poets bonded together through rivalry. Whereas for the older tradition, women’s envy inevitably led to slander, Stampa’s poetry seeks to recover a more original continuum, in which female rivalry could be productive. Where Laura Cereta had tried to divide women into educated and uneducated, thereby generating the space of an exception to the rule of female inferiority, Stampa imagines a “republic of women” whose subjects are not only elite women.31 By taking what had classically been described as the “natural” state of all women and presenting its positive outcome, Stampa portrays female invidia as the bond between women that mediates female desire and fuels poetic production. She does not explicitly present the female rival in her collection as a poet, but gestures at her potential to become a poet when she ascribes envy to her and ventriloquizes the rival’s desire to emulate her, as both a lover and a poet. It allows the potential for women’s writing en masse, where female invidia produces a positive form of rivalry that elevates women from their depiction in a literary tradition that historically pitted them against each other as enemies.

As discussed in the Editors’ Introduction to this volume, in the last ten years scholars have attempted to revise the conventional view of women’s writing as a phenomenon separate from male literary authorship be resituating its practice within the broader contexts of early modern print and publishing cultures. In this

31 I borrow the term “republic of women” (respublica muliebris) from Laura Cereta’s 1488 letter to Bibolo Semproni where she claims: “cum quibus Nicolosa Bononiensis, Isotaque Veronae & Cassandra Veneta sub silentii corusca luce transibunt”

(“and accompanying them [the learned women of the past] Nicolosa of Bologna, Isotta of Verona, and Cassandra of Venice will pass away under a shimmering light of silence.” Tom. 65, 187–95; Collected Letters, p. 78). Elsewhere I have close read of this passage within the context of women’s writing (Aileen A. Feng, “In Laura’s Shadow: Casting Female Humanists as Petrarchan Beloveds in Quattrocento Letters,” in The Inner Life of Women in Medieval Romance Literature: Grief, Guilt, and Hypocrisy, ed. Jeff Rider and Jamie Friedman, New Middle Ages Series [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011], pp. 223–47.





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regard, Diana Robin’s work on the collective publication processes in early to mid-1500s has revealed a system of networking that crossed gender boundaries, making collaborations between men and women a defining characteristic of the early printing culture in Italy.32 Particularly astute is her argument concerning the creation of virtual communities of women writers constructed by early anthologists like Giolito and his senior editor Lodovico Domenichi. As she notes, these anthologies “projected images of an egalitarian city of letters: courtesans and the daughters and sons of guildsmen shared space in its pages with aristocrats at the top of the social scale. But these were utopias of an editor’s imagining, not documents reflecting real-time sodality” (xxii). Stampa’s imagined community is more grounded in the realities of sixteenth-century Venice than those offered by the early anthologies discussed by Robin. On the one hand, Stampa’s community is not a vision of egalitarian utopia; the constant reminders of her class differences with Collaltino di Collalto throughout the collection overwrite sexual difference with asymmetrical power relations. But on the other hand, Stampa’s community is not one that unequivocally champions women as wholly misrepresented by the trope of invidia as Christine de Pizan did in Le Livre de la Cité des Dames (c. 1405), a response to the misogyny of Jean de Meun’s continuation of the Roman de la Rose. Stampa does not disregard the real conditions of women’s oppression, but at the same time she does not imagine an equally utopian, equally fantastic, united sisterhood uninterrupted by tension, disagreement, jealousy, or rivalry. In her virtual community, women are just as competitive as they are depicted in earlier writings about women: they are envious, jealous, and covet the lovers of their peers. What has changed is the end result of female rivalry: it no longer prohibits women from creating the bonds necessary for maintaining a community; it bonds women through rivalry to a community, present and future.

32 Diana Robin, Publishing Women. Salons, the Presses, and the Counter-Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007).



Desiring subjects: mimetic desire and female Invidia in Gaspara Stampa’s Rime

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