Melanie Racette-Campbell, University of Winnipeg
The 16th century Venetian poet and cortegiana onesta (high-status courtesan) Veronica Franco adapted ancient and contemporary literary traditions to articulate an outsider’s perspective on men, masculinity, and the relationships between men and women (Rosenthal 1992, Adler 1998, Wojciehowski 2006, Migiel 2016). In Renaissance Italy, many male poets wrote love poetry influenced by or directly imitating Ovid’s, both in Latin and in their vernacular, rooting themselves in Ovid’s tropes, characters, and genres. Franco’s poetry’s viewpoint was rooted in yet markedly different from these largely male-authored traditions, for which see Adler 1988 but also Jones 1990, Cox 2008 and 2011 for other Italian women’s writing. Franco’s poetry contains layers of reception, of Ovid directly, of Ovid’s reception of Propertius, and of her contemporaries’ receptions of Ovid. I argue that this reception serves Franco’s larger project of resisting and rejecting the stereotypical depictions of women, men, and relationships in the literature of her contemporaries and predecessors.
This paper begins by situating itself within the study of gender in Renaissance Italy, explaining the dominant style of masculinity and the role of women as the Other in literature (Quaintance 2015). The core of the paper is a close reading and comparison of a selection of poems by Ovid and by Franco. The first main section sets two of Ovid’s Heroides, XVI (Paris to Helen) and XVII (Helen to Paris) against the first two poems from Franco’s published collection of poetry, the Terze Rime (1575) (for these poems, see Phillipy 1992). These two poems, like Heroides XVI and XVII, function as a pair, with the second responding to the first. The first, Capitolo 1, was not written by Franco but rather by a male admirer, the patrician Venetian Marco Venier. It alternates between entreaties and threats, and I argue that it represents the male poetic tradition that Franco worked in and against. The second poem, Capitolo 2, is a response by Franco to the first, in which she responds to his praise and criticism of her and builds on the ventriloquism of women’s voices in Ovid to present herself as a docta puella who responds to and resists the male lover-poet’s characterization of her as cruel and capricious. A briefer second section considers the figure of the exclusus amator from Ovid Amores 1.6, long recognized as an intertext for Franco Capitolo 20 (Rosenthal 1992, 221). This paper adds a consideration of both Ovid and Franco’s receptions of the paraclausithyron in Propertius 1.16, suggesting that Franco draws on both Ovid and Propertius, a poet much less frequently referenced by Franco’s contemporaries (Gavinelli 2011). Franco’s skilled use of poetic traditions, ancient and contemporary, to resist not only her own subordination to male lovers and poets, but to argue for women’s subjectivity and the possibility of equitable relationships between men and women.