SOURCE: Phillipy, Patricia. “‘Altera Dido’: The Model of Ovid's Heroides in the Poems of Gaspara Stampa and Veronica Franco.” In Love's Remedies: Recantation and Renaissance Lyric Poetry, pp. 1-18. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Phillipy examines Stampa's and Franco's different uses of Ovid's Heroides to appropriate the Petrarchan lyric as a genre in which the female speaker is given a voice.

Ovid's Heroides, a text in which a male author adopts the voices of female speakers, offered to Renaissance women writers a model of “feminine” writing with which to revise Petrarchism for use by women poets. Both Gaspara Stampa's Rime (1554) and Veronica Franco's Terze Rime (1575) show the influence of aspects of this Ovidian model.¹ Ovid's text reverses the discursive imperatives of Petrarchism, which assert to the woman poet-lover that she must write “like a man” if she is to adopt the voice of the Petrarchan...