SOURCE: Braden, Gordon. “Gaspara Stampa and the Gender of Petrarchism.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 38, no. 2 (summer 1996): 115-39.

In the following essay, Braden argues that Stampa's work may have been the dominant paradigm of female Petrarchism. He examines Stampa's Rime d'amore, citing it as one of the most distinguished and exemplary sonnet sequences of the period.

The immense fact of Petrarchism gives Renaissance literature some of its most obvious insignia of continuity and coherence, but we have not been especially resourceful in assessing what they mean or even in keeping track of what they are. There is no circumstantial history of the international phenomenon as a whole; the catalogue of the Petrarch collection at Cornell University is perhaps the closest thing,¹ and even casual reading in its primary texts is apt to turn up surprises for scholars who thought they knew what they were going to find...