SOURCE: Bassanese, Fiora A. “The Feminine Voice: Gaspara Stampa.” Canadian Journal of Italian Studies 3, no. 2 (winter 1980): 81-88.

In the following essay, Bassanese explores the charactersitics of Stampa's poetic voice and her placing of her own persona as the center of her poetry.

A fascinating aspect of the love lyric in Renaissance Italy is its collective character, based upon the imitation of Petrarca and the cult of stylistic elegance. The poetic language of the common exemplar and the themes of the early Canzoniere were imitated and reworked to such a degree as to saturate the literary tradition and dominate the lyric vocabulary until, as Umberto Bosco noted, they had so deeply penetrated the cultural milieu as to become the language of the soul, the means through which reality was perceived¹. Such conventionality found its codification in the works of Pietro Bembo² which reflect the era's acceptance of creative imitation...