SOURCE: Smarr, Janet L. “Gaspara Stampa's Poetry for Performance.” Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association, no. 12 (1991): 61-84.

In the following essay, Smarr examines Stampa as a singer and also explores her combining of tragic tone and theme with wit in many of her poems.

During the mid-sixteenth century in Italy, when a remarkable number of women joined in the production of poetry, one of the channels open to their pursuit of intellectual life and fame was the Venetian salon. There music and poetry mingled as poems were frequently sung or recited before an audience rather than read privately in silence. The poetry of Gaspara Stampa was produced for this milieu. Published in 1554, a year after her death, her collection of more than three hundred poems has been approached in two main ways: as the autobiographical self-expression of a passionate woman and more recently as the...