SOURCE: Warnke, Frank J. “Aphrodite's Priestess, Love's Martyr: Gaspara Stampa.” In Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, edited by Katharina M. Wilson, pp. 3-11. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987.

In the following essay, Warnke examines the impact of Stampa's life as a “respectable courtesan” on her work. He concludes that Stampa was a lyric poet of considerable stature, capable of writing about women's place and sensibility like no other poet of her time.

Gaspara Stampa, the greatest woman poet of the Italian Renaissance, was born in Padua, probably in 1524. Her father, a jeweler, died while she was still a girl, and her family moved to Venice, where she spent the remainder of her short life. In both her life and her work she provides a dramatic contrast with another prominent woman poet of the time—Vittoria Colonna, great aristocrat and Platonic beloved of Michelangelo. Vittoria was noble...