Gaspara Stampa's Petrarchan Commemorations: Validating a Female Lyric Discourse (Critical Essay‪)‬

Accepting the Cinquecento's dominant ideology, Gaspara Stampa reworked Francis Petrarch's words, themes, forms, and metaphors as a validated means of forming her own lyric discourse within the limitations imposed by imitation. Declaring herself a dedicated Petrarchist, Stampa nevertheless managed to express her own existential situation and her sex by utilizing allusive reinvention rather than slavish reproduction, even in her most overtly derivative compositions. This essay considers Gaspara Stampa's imitative strategies by analyzing her innamoramento poem and the three anniversary sonnets contained in the Rime (1554), taking into account the function of the Petrarchan model as an instrument for creative self-fashioning. While these four sonnets openly appropriate the language and imagery of the Canzoniere, they also manipulate the source's constituent elements to adjust for gender, forming novel metaphors and conceits, and rendering a female discourse possible. By assimilating Petrarch's voice, Gaspara Stampa was able to speak of herself and her sex in a manner her audience understood and appreciated as the ideal medium for lyric self-expression. **********