Gaspara Stampa and the gender of Petrarchism.(Critical Essay)

The immense fact of Petrarchism gives Renaissance literature some of its most obvious insignia of continuity and coherence, but we have not been especially resourceful in assessing what they mean or even in keeping track of what they are. There is no circumstantial history of the international phenomenon as a whole; the catalogue of the Petrarch collection at Cornell University is perhaps the closest thing, (1) and even casual reading in its primary texts is apt to turn up surprises for scholars who thought they knew what they were going to find. Part of the problem is the multilingual vastness of the material--which in the fullest definition includes texts in sixteenth-century Croatian and demotic Cypriot--but the field of Renaissance studies copes with that all the time. There is something extra in this particular tradition which has resisted patient assimilation. The erotic trance at its emotional center is in some ways instantly familiar, even humiliatingly so--modern students understand it when you call it a crush--but its prolonged elaboration in uncountably similar poems tends to be alien to contemporary sensibilities, a program that (like other people's obsessions generally) manages to be simultaneously tedious and bizarre, both boring and a little alarming. When practical criticism deals with a poem's relation to Petrarchan conventions, it often puts its energy--as if this were mere common sense--into detecting deviation from those conventions and interpreting that deviation agonisticaily. The usual way in our profession to appreciate a specimen of Renaissance Petrarchism is to celebrate its attempt to break out of that category. There are times when such a perspective is clearly called for ("no such Roses see I in her cheekes"). There are also times, many times, when presenting a nuance as a rupture is not much more than a rhetorical decision on the part of the interpreter. Sorting such matters out will require a steadier, more informed effort of historical sympathy than we have yet been able to manage.

I do not know how widely this need is felt. References to Petrarchism in recent criticism (particularly English-language criticism) often imply that we largely know what to make of it now--an impression due, perhaps, to the conceptual power of a pair of famous essays by John Freccero and Nancy Vickers. (2) Both essays are brief and, despite some allusions to the forthcoming tradition, are focused on Petrarch himself; neither is part of a systematic larger study (Vickers's was said to be part of one, but it has not appeared). Yet it is not uncommon to find either or both of them invoked (they do not say the same thing, but they can be made to work together) as an acknowledged synthesis of what Petrarchism comes to, without much in the way of independent verification, for the purpose, usually, of defining the subversiveness of the poet to hand. There are reasons for this: both essays do what they do quite well, and not only do they seem to offer a way around a mass of unbeguiling reading matter, but they also help give a name to the distaste modern readers tend to feel in its presence. But the result has at times been a distortion that doesn't have to happen.

I am not much concerned here with Freccero's essay, which I think has proved the more reliable and useful. Vickers's argument is the more complicated, much of it worked out in commandingly intricate close readings. The influential thesis, however, is a tangent drawn from those readings into the future: "Silencing Diana [in Petrarch's Canzoniere 23] is an emblematic gesture; it suppresses a voice, and it casts generations of would-be Lauras in a role predicated upon the muteness of its player." (3) Depriving the worshipped woman of speech is part of the nature and, indeed, the purpose of Petrarchism. Much of the work of the essay goes into making this conclusion look like a consequence of more readily recognized features of the tradition, notably its style of idealized physical description. The assembled result jumps from literary analysis into social history, with Petrarchism one of the vehicles by which the status of women in early modern Europe is subtly but firmly degraded:

First, Petrarch's figuration of Laura informs a decisive stage in the development of a code of beauty, a code that causes us to view the fetishized body as a norm.... And second, bodies fetishized by a poetic voice logically do not have a voice of their own; the world of making words, of making texts, is not theirs. (4)

Among other things, apparently, the dominance of Petrarchism helps explain why more women did not pursue a literary career; it is the means by which an oppressive ideology of gender relations gains power over first-person lyric utterance.

This thesis has been generalized and sometimes coarsened by others:

The logic of love-poetry in the Renaissance is that of the gaze, the discrimination of form and the rendering open and passive of the beautiful object--the woman perceived as territory.... Within such a language situation, the woman can speak only as a blank space, a hole in discourse, or--as a passive recipient of the male organ of speech/sex-- within the man's language. (5)

Later critics often do not take Vickers's trouble to deduce the proposition from the material; it indeed can be linked, as is the case here, to an attack on conventional standards of evidence:

Our empiricist methodology--the positivist insistence on observing and analyzing what is given or apparently there in the text--ends in an impasse and an acceptance of discursive limitations which quietly oppress or marginalize our concerns to examine and perhaps challenge the dominant categories not only of our literature but of our history. (6)

That sounds in turn a little like an attempt to place the thesis at hand beyond challenge--though a thesis that declines such challenge is not likely to stay with us.

Gendering Petrarchism as male, of course, second-guesses the usual Renaissance complaint. The standard joke about the Petrarchan lover is his effeminacy:

 
Be not too apish female, do not come 
With foolish Sonets to present her with, 
With legs, with curtesies, congies, and such like: 
Nor with pend speeches, or too far fetcht sighes, 
I hate such antick queint formalitie. (7) 

It is not unknown for the targets of such scorn to accept the equation and turn it to feminist account; so Juan Boscan, setting out to introduce Italian lyric forms into Castile and coming up against those who object "that the verses had to be principally for women":

who is going to waste time responding to them? I consider women of such substance, those who succeed in being so, and many do succeed, that whoever should try to defend them in this matter would offend them. So for these men, and all those of their ilk, they have permission to say what they wish, because I do not plan on being very friendly with them. (8)

Pietro Bembo, more responsible than anyone else for Petrarch's sixteenth-century canonization, is forthright about opening the literary life to women, holding out for them the Petrarchan reward of (if need be) posthumous fame:

If women do not occupy all their free time with those duties which are said to be proper to them, but devote their whole leisure to literary studies and these pursuits [discourses about love], it makes little difference what some men say about it, for sooner or later the world will praise the women for it. (9)

One of the personal experiences behind this stance was a recent love affair with a woman whose letters, dense with Petrarchan allusion and imitation, he would reread in his old age; their joint correspondence is among other things a look at Petrarchism become without apparent effort the language of mutual desire. (10) As a public man in later life he regularly exchanged letters and poems with Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara. The literary world in which Bembo moved indeed becomes the premier site of female lyric poetry in the Renaissance, and not merely in decorous privacy; no fewer than six women published Rime during their own lifetime in Italy (mostly in Venice) between 1538 and 1575. (11) Numerous women poets appear in the Giolito anthologies--a de facto canon of contemporary Italian lyric--that appeared from 1545 on; (12) and their main editor, Lodovico Domenichi, took the unprecedented step of producing in 1559 an anthology almost exclusively of women poets (331 poems by 53 different writers). (13) Possibly in response, scholarly fantasy populated earlier literary history with more female poets than were really there. One myth linked the start of Petrarch's own poetic vocation not just to Laura, but to the inspirational example of a female poet who was said to be the addressee of Canzoniere 7; in some accounts she is one of a circle of similarly gendered writers, whose reputed sonnets sometimes made it into print. (14) Another legend made Laura herself a poet, part of a Cour d'amour of women continuing the art of the troubadours. (15)

What such evidence seems to me to suggest is that critical insistence on the maleness of Petrarchism is premature subtlety that blurs the texture of the tradition's historical placement and obscures what is unusual and noteworthy about its place in the grid of gender relations. Petrarchism is masculine, or masculinist, to the extent to which all Renaissance culture deserves that label; we can readily imagine styles of lyric utterance more suitable to what we think woman poets would or should want…