Recensioni / Book Reviews / Revues des Livres to celebrate the subject’s recovered liberty from Love’s power due to Laura’s death, which protects Petrarch from the snare of her physical beauty. Moreover, the giogo antico is a major trope in the Canzoniere and overwhelmingly a negative symbol of ignominy and bondage (e.g., RVF 28.61–62). There may well be sound reasons in this instance to supplant that connotation, but Peterson does not supply them. Nevertheless, it remains clear that Petrarch’s RVF are, if polysemous, equally a unified and theologically engaged narrative, the shape of which tells us much about both Petrarch himself and the Humanists who were his great legacy. If Peterson’s attempt at a comprehensive analysis falls somewhat short, I suspect that the categories he proposes will inflect the ongoing critical conversation in impor- tant ways. Should we ever resolve the problem of Petrarch’s Fragmenta, it will be because we stood upon such shoulders.

Joel S. Pastor University of South Carolina

Unn Falkeid and Aileen A. Feng, editors. Rethinking Gaspara Stampa in the Canon of Renaissance Poetry. London-New York: Routledge Limited, 2016. Pp. 236.

Gaspara Stampa (1523?–1554) was a renowned poetess, musician, and singer who made a strong impact on sixteenth-century Italian culture but who, unfortunately, was forgotten after her death. Her poetry was republished in the eighteenth century, yet her work was underestimated and presented in a distorted way; her poetry and personal story were exploited through myths and prejudices. Only in the last few decades has Stampa’s poetry been carefully studied and interpreted, using a critical approach and a textual analysis through the social, cultural, and intellectual context in which it was produced. Rethinking Gaspara Stampa in the Canon of Renaissance Poetry is a praiseworthy effort by an international group of interdisciplinary scholars who each employ different methodologies to investigate Stampa’s poetry. This volume aims to offer a more authentic interpretation of Stampa’s lyrical verses and to restore this long-misunderstood and neglected author to her proper place among the poets of the Renaissance. The book is a collection of 10 chapters grouped into three parts. The first part, “The Sublime,” begins with an essay by Jane Tylus, who analyzes the relations

— 260 — Recensioni / Book Reviews / Revues des Livres between Stampa and Sappho, showing that Stampa aimed to emulate the female Greek poet who, like she did, wrote lyrics that could be sung and accompanied by a lyre. According to Tylus, Stampa consciously endeavours to identify herself with Sappho to reinforce her authority as a writer of lyrical verse. The second essay, by Unn Falkeid, investigates Stampa’s ability to embrace a broader concept of Neoplatonism in order to reach a “sublime realism” in which she combines her imitative strategies of Petrarch with descriptions of a physical and consummate love. The first part concludes with an essay by Federico Schneider on the sublime love pains in Stampa’s Rime as an imitation of the love pains expressed in Petrarch’s Canzoniere, used as an “indispensable component of the affect-rousing character (ethos) performing the initiation into love, which moves the reader to admiration” (59). The second part, “Real, Virtual, and Imagined Communities,” opens with the essay by Aileen A. Feng, who explores Stampa’s use of the trope of female invidia that is widely present in Renaissance discourses. Feng posits that Stampa includes female rivals in her poetry in order to show that invidia in other women was provoked by their desire to be talented poets, as she was. Feng argues that these female rivals serve to challenge the classic trope of invidia as a destructive element in female life; she explains that, “rather than deny the existence of female invidia, [Stampa] embraces and recodes it as a positive and productive attribute of female homosociality” (80). In the following essay, Ann Rosalind Jones analyzes Stampa’s jealousy poems and points out that Stampa’s aim was to write verses completely detached from the love poetry of her predecessors. Going beyond the Petrarchan conventions that influenced the early-modern lyric, Stampa seeks to shock her readers by introducing variations on the themes of social challenges, amorous longing, and jealousy. In the sixth essay, Angela Capodivacca examines the fictional poetic exchange between Stampa and Hyppolita Mirtilla, imagined and arranged in the eighteenth century by Luisa Bergalli and created by Bergalli herself using poems written by Giusto de’ Conti (1390–1449). Her work was later included in Luigi Carrer’s publication Anello di sette gemme o Venezia e la sua storia (Venice: Il Gondoliere, 1838). Capodivacca explains that Carrer’s forgery is based on Ludovico Domenichi’s incorrect attribution of de’ Conti’s writing to the poetess Mirtilla and later on Bergalli’s work’s attempting to create a ge- nealogy of female poets based on a friendly correspondence. The last essay in part two, written by William J. Kennedy, focuses on the way in which Stampa

— 261 — Recensioni / Book Reviews / Revues des Livres positions herself as a professional writer, bolsters her reputation, attracts atten- tion, and gains esteem. Kennedy argues that “Stampa is promoting a new poetics that dramatizes her love for Collaltino. […] [S]he puts into question the poetic authority of the man whom she cherishes while claiming her own authority over the Petrarchan mode that she shares with him” (144). Kennedy analyzes Stampa’s writing technique, such as her recurrent topos of humility, with which the poetess, praising and flattering male poets, promotes her work and places herself in social gatherings among poets and writers of her milieu. The third and last part of the volume is entitled “Personae” and begins with an essay by Ulrike Schneider, who examines the different roles orpersonae that Stampa plays in her Rime: the (nameless) first-person speaker, the figure of “Anassilla,” and the figure of “Stampa” (161). Schneider argues that the way in which Stampa embraces three differentpersonae reveals “an implicit reflection on the fictional status of poetry” (161), opening the debate on the nature of the lyric between fact and fiction. The following essay by Veronica Andreani analyzes Stampa’s emulation in her sonnets of unhappy lovers like Dido, Evadne, and Eco, but Andreani points out that Stampa introduces a change in the stereotype of abandoned female lovers in the Greco-Roman literary tradition; instead of com- mitting suicide, Stampa seeks a rebirth of her persona by opening her heart to an- other man. For this reason, the last poems of the Rime are written to Bartolomeo Zen rather than to Collaltino di Collalto, who rejected her love. In the last essay of the volume, Troy Tower examines implications that indicate “Stampa’s iden- tification with a river that is in turn identified with her beloved” (186). In his analysis, Tower suggests that Stampa’s interaction with the river implies attention and respect for the environment and an explicit engagement of the poetess in what we now call literary ecology. Ultimately, this collection achieves its main goal of reclaiming Stampa’s sta- tus as a major poet of the Renaissance and offers a valuable and useful contribu- tion to the steadily growing literature on early-modern women writers.

Nicla Riverso University of Washington

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