Challenging the Boundaries: Early Modern Women Writing About Earthly Love

Abstract

This essay considers the social and cultural challenges faced by lower-class women in sixteenth-century Italy who wished to be taken seriously as literary figures, as exemplified by Gaspara Stampa and Isabella Andreini. Both women were poets who wrote about earthly love in their Rime. I investigate the tactics they used to establish themselves as professional authors in a male-dominated literary landscape. These included reworking Petrarch’s forms and metaphors and adopting subversive themes in order to create a lyric discourse which reached beyond the societal expectations and restrictions imposed on female authors in the early modern period. Overcoming social and cultural boundaries, Stampa and Andreini were bold and talented authors whose earthly love poetry asserts a strong female voice in a literary tradition which often silenced women.