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Epithalamium Interruptum : Maddalena Campigliais New Arcadia
Lori J. Ultsch
MLN, Volume 120, Number 1, January 2005 (Italian Issue), pp. 70-92 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.2005.0035
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/179879
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]70 LORI J. ULTSCH
Epithalamium Interruptum:
Maddalena Campiglia’s
New Arcadia
❦
Lori J. Ultsch
Sola Fenice nova forma io prendo1
A woman living outside the bond of marriage or without the compan-
ionship of a man is a topos that figures conspicuously in the oeuvre of
the Vicentine noblewoman Maddalena Campiglia (1553–95).
Diachronically, the treatment of marriage in Campiglia’s body of work
1
The verse is taken from Campiglia’s sonnet “L’istessa per la sua impresa.” The
sonnet and Campiglia’s emblem, the phoenix, appear printed on facing pages (6v and
7r) after the text of the Calisa in the original 1589 edition (n. pag.). The emblem also
appears in both exemplars of the Flori consulted for this study and held by the
Marciana Library in Venice (Dramm. 255 and Dramm. 3804). The phoenix burns on a
pyre, straining toward the divine light streaming from above; on both sides are limbless
male torsos with monstrous faces that match the torso-less one below. The sole face
identifiable as human is a female one which appears centered at the top of the
emblem, above the phoenix and divine light. Campiglia’s motto is printed under the
pyre: Tempore sic duro (Thus I endure through time). The version of the explanatory
sonnet reprinted in the appendix of Giuseppe De Marco’s study lacks the eighth verse
which I have chosen as an epigraph to my study (82). Perrone’s introduction to the
Calisa alludes to the sonnet twice (29 and 67) but reproduces only select verses. I
therefore report the sonnet in its entirety here:
Dei miei desiri accesi il rogo ascendo,
E l’ali sparte del pensier diletto
Provo, che tal non cape in human petto.
Mentre nel sol ch’adoro, il guardo intendo,
In puro foco indi felice ardendo
Sgombrar sento da l’alma l’imperfetto,
E in dolci fiamme (opposta a chiaro obietto)
Sola Fenice nova forma prendo.
Sola Fenice in ben amar, del core
MLN 120 (2005): 70–92 © 2005 by The Johns Hopkins University PressMLN 71
moves from an initial celebration of the chaste union between Mary
and Joseph (1585), to the representation of a recalcitrant nymph who
disrupts the social normalization encoded in a traditional marriage
(1588), and ultimately to the words of a nymph whose ardent
expression of love for another nymph receives a male-voiced imprima-
tur of social acceptability (1589). The repeated treatment of such
questions as marriage and secular celibacy in Campiglia’s works lends
an overall coherence to her oeuvre and suggests an interpretive
framework for approaching her unique female protagonists.
Virginia Cox’s observation that Moderata Fonte’s protofeminist Il
merito delle donne (ca. 1592, pub. 1600) is one of the first texts that
provides a virtual handbook of “a clear status and a clear identity for
the secular unmarried woman” (563) is a significant claim that can
also be made apropos Campiglia’s body of work. How to live without
a husband in a secular context—known in critical parlance as the
“third state” of secular celibacy2—emerges as a dominant motif in
Campiglia’s repeated engagement with situations that articulate a
partial or complete rupture with normative marriage practices and
the imposed gender roles within that institution. As two early modern
women authors in the Venetian context who seem to have written
without knowledge of the other’s work, both Fonte and Campiglia
dialogue with the well-established and largely misogynistic tradition
of the trattatistica sul prender moglie. In doing so, they voice a
protofeminist, oppositional response to this tradition and write the
parameters of a new genre: the trattatistica sul non prender marito.
While Fonte’s Il merito delle donne voices a celebration of women as
much as it exposes men as a domineering, manipulative, cruel and
ignorant sex with which to best shun commerce, Campiglia eschews
such strong censure and instead focuses her textual attention on
In sì soave ardor le voglie affino,
Nè vil pensiero entro al mio seno albergo.
Ove dal NUME mio, che humile inchino,
Qualità presa, anchor lasciarmi a tergo.
Spero qual arse in più perfetto amore.
For the significance of the phoenix as an emblem of self-generation and piety in
which classical and Renaissance authors alike “hanno voluto con sì bello pensiero del
suo bruciarsi, e rinascer al Sole, descriver leggiadramente con misteriosa, e sacra
allegoria, non la materiale, ò corporal Fenice, ma la spiritual intentione, e la mente, ò
intelletto umano,” see Ruscelli (224 specifically and, in general, 137–42 and 220–25).
2
For a socio-historical account and discussion of the term “third state,” see Gabriella
Zarri (in particular Chapter 7, “Il «terzo stato»”).72 LORI J. ULTSCH
praising the intellect, fidelity, chastity, beauty and steadfastness of
women. Men in Campiglia’s world are denounced only to the extent
to which their desire prevents the full realization and preservation of
women’s many virtues.
As a recognized master of pastoral and a contributor to the Italian
querelle des femmes,3 Torquato Tasso, upon reading Campiglia’s Flori,
gallantly declared himself defeated and overwhelmed by the “piacere
d’essere vinto” (Lettere IV: 234). The insistence in Tasso’s brief letter
upon the notion of victory may have been nothing more than a
gallant pun upon Vicenza as Campiglia’s birthplace; Tasso may have
penned his letter to Campiglia moved solely by the polite obligation
to extend thanks for the book she had sent him; he may have
responded to her gesture because he thought it wise to validate the
literary efforts of a friend of Curzio Gonzaga; he may have admired
Campiglia’s contribution to an increasingly popular genre. Although
it is interesting to ponder what may have motivated the poet to
respond to Campiglia’s gift, what the existence of the letter and its
allusion to Campiglia’s unsolicited presentation of her work to the
author of the Aminta reveal is that Campiglia undoubtedly had Tasso’s
model and its conventions in mind as she composed her Flori. For any
dramatist of pastoral in the late sixteenth century—be it closet
pastoral or pastoral intended for representation—the Aminta was an
ineluctable presence, as was the genre’s traditional happy ending.
The dramatized or implied singing of the epithalamium in the genre’s
denouement celebrates the lovers soon to be joined in marriage. The
epithalamium as rite of passage sanctions the amorous union between
nymph and shepherd in the pastoral heterocosm. Beyond the text-
bound performative event itself, this conventional rite of legitimiza-
tion in a larger sense also serves to re-authorize or reaffirm social
hierarchies and ideological praxes.
If Campiglia in sending her Flori to Tasso did not exactly suffer
from an anxiety of influence, she wisely recognized the need to show
herself conversant with the conventions of the genre—in order to
claim the authority to ultimately diverge from them.4 As one of the
3
Tasso’s Il discorso della virtù feminile e donnesca was published in Venice in 1582.
4
See Ann Rosalind Jones regarding the question of the need for women writers to be
conversant with generic conventions and to adopt a self-deprecating pose as reflections
of their conscious maneuvering within “the absolute centrality of men as readers and
writers in the sixteenth-century literary system” (322). This study of three female
authors explores in general the injunction to silence and invisibility cast upon women.
Various authors such as Varchi, Tasso, Guazzo and Barbaro maintained (via oft-citedMLN 73
first women authors to publish pastoral, Campiglia was only too aware
of potential criticism.5 In her dedicatory letter to Curzio Gonzaga she
is the first to point out the Flori’s defects (a failure to respect the
Aristotelian unity of action and a tendency toward prolixity) as she
requests Gonzaga’s continuing patronage and guidance. She is aware
that as a woman-author of pastoral she is a groundbreaking novelty
bound to incur male censure:
[S]opra tutto la gentilezza del cortesissimo animo di V.S. Illustrissimo m’hà
dato sicurezza non che speranza, che ella sia per difender questo mio
poema pastorale da tutti quelli del sesso virile, i quali se ne scopriranno
detrattori ò per maligna dispositione, ò per abuso di sinistro giuditio
contra i componimenti poetici delle donne. Sò che le oppositioni saranno
molte; ma di questa sola far dovrei stima: che fatto havessi meglio spendere
tempo in scritti spirituali, si come havea cominciato, sviando la mente da
qualunque vano pensiero [...]. (4v–5r)6
By critiquing her own work in a dedicatory letter, Campiglia not only
preempts negative criticism by anticipating it, but also—through a
required show of self-deprecating humility—claims the authority to
contravene against the same “masculine” rules she pointedly cites:
“[M]a tuttavia [...] io crederò, che questa, fatta da donna, e da donna
forse poco atta a simile impresa, debba esser letta, se non con lode,
almeno con sopportatione” (5r –5v). In addition, the telling choice of
two dedicatees for the Flori, the aforementioned Gonzaga and Isabella
Pallavicino Lupi, Marchioness of Soragna, points to an added awareness
Thucydides) that the fame most befitting a woman is that private fame restricted to the
domestic sphere (321). Campiglia, on the occasion of her work’s entrance into a public
arena dominated by men, published her Flori with a legitimating collection of
commendatory sonnets written by male intellectuals. These compositions praise not
only the drama, but also the many virtues of the author. Campiglia’s dedicatory letters
likewise pointedly refer to her male literary “connections”; among them are Angelo
Ingegneri, an author of numerous pastorals, Curzio Gonzaga, a diplomat and poet
from a minor branch of the Gonzaga known as i Nobili, and Paolo Chiappino, an
accademico olimpico.
5
For an orientation to sixteenth-century women’s contributions to established
genres, see Panizza and Wood’s A History of Women’s Writing in Italy. For a discussion of
women’s contributions to pastoral drama in this source, see Virginia Cox’s chapter on
fiction where she briefly discusses—in addition to Campiglia—Isabella Andreini,
Barbara Torelli and a cluster of pastoralists in Lucca.
6
A facing-page, prose translation of the Flori is currently in preparation by Virginia
Cox in the University of Chicago’s Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series. My citations
of the Flori, therefore, refer to the pagination of the 1588 edition. When warranted—
for example, when discussing the distribution of significant actions across the drama—
I also refer the reader to act and scene parenthetically.74 LORI J. ULTSCH
on Campiglia’s part of the novelty of her undertaking and the need to
protect herself from public censure.7 Alongside the conventional
references to modesty in Campiglia’s dedicatory letter to Pallavicino,
the rhetorical trope she constructs of herself as artist-creator evinces
a desire to express how the “author-mother” departs from gender
conventions and how the “work-daughter” will need the protection of
powerful patrons as a line of defense against inevitable detractors:
[L]a imperfettione di questo mio poema è tale, che per aventura hà piu
bisogno del favor della sua protettione per farlo rispettare da i maldicenti,
che che possa recar à lei alcuno accrescimento di gloria. Sono tuttavia
sicurissima che sendo ella tanto virile ne i pensieri, e nelle operationi
quanto donna nel bellissimo sembiante, e negli honestissimi portamenti,
aggradirà questo mio rozzo parto [...]. Sogliono tutte le madri d’hoggidì
dovendo far comparir fuori le loro figlie comporle nella piu leggiadra
maniera, che si sanno imaginare ricercando à questo effetto i piu riposti, e
piu astrusi cantoni dell’arte il che à me non giova fare, procurando piu
tosto d’allontanarmi dall’ordinario costume donnesco. Miri ella dunque
non con l’occhio della serena sua fronte in questa mia figlia estrinseca
pompa di vanità volgare [...] ma col lume del suo nobilissimo intelletto, la
candida lealtà di che ella viene si riccamente vestita [...]. (2v–3v)
Campiglia’s dedicatory letters thus reveal a tension grounded in
questions of both literary and gendered expectations for women. She
presents the Flori aware that her work challenges the boundaries
between cultural expectations for women—devotional literature as a
sanctioned topic and motherhood as a sanctioned activity—and her
own desire to distance herself from those very expectations.
Campiglia’s first published work, her evidence of “scritti spirituali”
to which she alludes in her dedicatory letter to Gonzaga, is the
Discorso sopra l’Annonciatione della Beata Vergine (1585). Undeniably,
devotional literature constituted one of the socially acceptable genres
7
The first dedicatory letter is to Pallavicino, the second to Gonzaga. The order of the
letters may reflect the conventions of polite society whereby one would place the letter
to Isabella first as an expression of deference to a woman or to a noble with higher
rank. Gonzaga belonged to a minor branch of the powerful family whereas Pallavicino
was titled. The order of the letters may also reflect, however, how Campiglia thought it
particularly appropriate to have a woman as the first dedicatee of a work which
addresses the question of marriage. The choice of a male friend as the second
dedicatee could only buttress the respectabilty of both play and author. In Virginia
Cox’s introduction to her forthcoming translation of the Flori (which she has kindly
shared with me), Cox points out that Pallavicino was a noteworthy patron of literature
and, in particular, of pastoral drama. Her sphere of influence extended beyond
Soragna to include not only Campiglia, but also other authors of pastoral such as
Barbara Torelli, Angelo Ingegneri, and Giovanni Donato Cucchetti.MLN 75
for women in the period,8 but Campiglia’s debut with this subject
matter should not be attributed to a socially de rigueur or even
strategic impulse on the author’s part. As I have argued extensively
elsewhere,9 Campiglia’s piety is consonant with her protofeminist
valorization of female autonomy and agency. Moreover, her early
interest in writing devotional literature (both this work and various
sonnets on the Passion) may have been fostered by her relationship
with a secular community of dimesse active in Vicenza precisely during
the decade which saw the author’s separation from her husband,
return to Vicenza, literary production and firm establishment within
the Vicentine cultural milieu (represented by the Accademia Olimpica
and the Perin Press which also housed a library). The ardent apology
of the virginal and spiritual union between Mary and Joseph that
Campiglia voices in her Discorso of 1585 proves illuminating for the
unique construction of marriage enacted in 1588 by the eponymous
protagonist of Campiglia’s Flori and the author’s subsequent
rearticulation of the topos in her 1589 pastoral eclogue, Calisa.
Campiglia’s praise of virginity as the most sublime and pure of
metaphysical states informs the Discorso and her praise of the “eccel-
lentissima donna, Vergine sopra tutte le Vergini” (23). The figure of
Mary and the celebration of her life provide Campiglia the opportu-
nity to express her evident devotion to the ideal of the intact female
body.10 This same impassioned celebration is disrupted, however, by a
denunciation of contemporary marriage practices in “questi tempi
nostri, ove non altro si scorge, o intende, che crudeli risse, inauditi
rancori, empie parole, buggiarde calonnie, e scellerate azioni” (6). In
contrast to this (highly personal?) view of marriage as an accumulatio
of iniquities, Campiglia’s marriage ideal achieves full realization in
the spiritual union between the Virgin and Joseph:
8
I refer the reader once again to Panizza and Wood, in particular Chapter 6
“Religious and Devotional Writing, 1400–1600” by Gabriella Zarri.
9
In an article currently under review, “Uncloistering the Dimessa: Maddalena
Campiglia, An Early Modern Poet in Vicenza,” I examine the polyvalent term dimessa in
16th-century usage and explore how the question of a potential relationship between
Campiglia and the dimesse (a community of secular celibates dedicated to worship,
charity and learning active in Vicenza precisely during years of Campiglia’s separation
from her husband and subsequent literary efforts) may have arisen.
10
Campiglia addresses the question of the viability of Mary’s preservation of virginity
during marriage and praises Joseph’s aspiration to a spiritual union with his wife
“poichè non già mai nacque nel puro animo di costui un minimo pensiero
d’incommodar i castissimi propositi di questa Santa Vergine, o violare i termini della
Verginità sua” (3).76 LORI J. ULTSCH
Viveano queste anime felici di casti desiri, e di verginal unione, così l’uno
à l’altro conformi, e uniti, che niun’altro matrimonio giamai fu più vero,
più sinciero, o più Santo. In questo consenso degli animi loro s’effettuò
veracemente il matrimonio, poiche con questa mutua verginità in mutua
servitù consolati, si posero ambi in obligo espresso di mutua, e perpetua
fede. (6–7)
The spiritual consensus realized in the Marian marriage exemplum
effectively obviates the consent to bodily desires. Marriage is a
metaphysical act where the desired union is not measured by a
consent enacted through the body, but rather by a consensus achieved
through the spirit. In praise of this desire for transcendence of
corporality toward a spiritual embrace even within the marriage
bond, Gregorio Ducchi pronounced the devotional treatise an appro-
priate expression of the unimpeachable reputation of its author,
“vedova delle cose mundane.”11
The Recalcitrant Nymph
Campiglia’s remaining two works—the pastoral Flori (1588) and the
pastoral eclogue Calisa (1589)—depart from the genre of devotional
literature to continue the exploration of marriage, virginity and
gender roles in a secular context. Outside the confines of purely
devotional literature, Campiglia’s works become more engaged with
contemporary social realities. Here the author makes some provoca-
tive observations on women’s lives in the early modern period. The
vehicle or portavoce of these observations is a stock character of the
pastoral world fashioned to Campiglia’s unconventional taste: the
recalcitrant, alienated nymph.
It has by now become a critical commonplace that in the putatively
imaginary space of the idyllic pastoral world, social commentary and
critique are hard at work. Space, both male and female, is legislated
and controlled (Feminist Encyclopedia 246–47). References to the
Golden Age grieve the loss of pleasure, freedom and instinct; but the
11
Gregorio Ducchi, the Brescian author of La Scacheide, will also contribute a sonnet
in praise of the Flori that appears with the other twenty-six printed at the end of the
work. Ducchi’s letter praising the Calisa and the reputation of its author appears at the
end of the Calisa before numerous commendatory poems by Ducchi himself, Campiglia,
Muzio Sforza, Giovan Battista Maganza (who son Alessandro painted the portrait of
Campiglia currently on display in the Teatro Olimpico of Vicenza), Luigi Groto (the so-
called Cieco d’Adria), and Angelo Ingegneri, among others. The Discorso’s eighty-eight
pages are numbered; the commendatory compositions that follow are not.MLN 77 ultimate signification of the genre—after a measure of ludic hedo- nism and the titillating threat of anarchy—is the reassuringly narcis- sistic, self-affirming utterance of the legitimizing forces of society and its rules, s’ei lice, piace. If we accept that the pastoral reflects and reinforces the reigning order of society and disabuse ourselves of the notion, as Clubb has encouraged, that “Aminta and Il pastor fido represent all there is to know about the genre” (97), we are naturally quite curious to know what is being communicated when, without a trace of exaggeration, we can say that we have in hand a sixteenth- century woman author’s revolutionary reflections on society and its rules of hierarchy, gender and propriety. What is immediately striking in the pastoral Flori written by this Vicentine woman in 1588 is that it is partially successful in bringing to the stage what had previously been an unrepresented or even unrepresentable subject in the pastoral heterocosm: the third state and the lifestyle choice of a learned dimessa. I will argue that Campiglia’s alternative treatment of the topos of the recalcitrant nymph confounds the traditional jouissance of the pastoral genre whereby the nymph and shepherd are ineluctably directed toward a socially sanctioned form of love constituted in the marriage act and the performative singing of the epithalamium. In the pastoral mind’s eye of Flori a compromise resolution emerges that mediates the vast ideological rift between the mutually exclusive options of an authorized acceptance or an unauthorized rejection of marriage. Campiglia’s solution boldly projects a state of secular celibacy onto the marriage bond and the Arcadian landscape. The performative utterance that traditionally makes two bodies one no longer obtains. Instead, the Flori ’s denouement enacts the union of the spirit or intellect and its necessary corollary, the separation of the bodies. A variation on the “sopra naturale, anzi Angelico matrimo- nio” of Mary and Joseph (Discorso 7) remaps the coordinates of the pastoral world through a privileging of a specifically female voice and perspective and an existence defined as the harmonious fusion of intellect and devotion. The eponymous nymph of Campiglia’s Flori struggles between the external-bodily and internal-spiritual forces represented in the text by the amorous desires of her suitors versus the devotional consecration of her virgin body to Diana. The recalcitrant nymph struggles to preserve her virginity and honor her dedication to Diana against an onslaught of besotted suitors and satyrs. What Serrano, Androgeo and Alessi all try to win through sweet words, deeds and sighs, the
78 LORI J. ULTSCH
lusty satyrs attempt to take by force. Meanwhile, ancillary love
triangles proliferate in the plot and arrive at their traditional happy
endings. Richard Andrews in his presentation of pastoral drama in
The Cambridge History of Italian Literature reads the nymph’s predica-
ment in the genre as constitutive of the conflict between diametrically
opposed types of pleasure: the pleasure of the freedom of virginity
and the pleasure of surrender to the love of a pursuing male. Initially,
the nymph-young woman is praised for her chastity but eventually
must succumb to the dictates of the genre-society through the
legitimizing rite of marriage (294). Campiglia’s Flori problematizes
the traditional trajectory of the initiation to love that moves from
refusal, insanity and social marginalization to acceptance, sanity and
social insertion. In the prologue which emphasizes disturbances in
gender hierarchies, Love promises a “coppia [...] unqua veduta” (8r)
about to materialize in the figures of Flori and Alessi, thus providing
the first reference to the unusual nature of their marriage union:
Ameranno, arderan, ma il fine ond’altri
Ogni lor brama appaga, non fie mai
Da lor pensato pur, non che bramato.
Virtute occulta inusitata, e nova
In somma havran gli dardi, che ferita
Faran profonda ma sì honesta, e santa
Che meraviglia altrui porran nel core
Spesso lor voglie ardenti sì, ma caste.
(8r –8v)
In the list of characters that projects this previously unseen and
unrepresented couple onto the Arcadian landscape, Flori figures as
the “ninfa pazza” and Alessi as the “pastore straniero” (6v). Thus, the
marginalization embodied in these adjectival descriptors allows the
possibility that their union establish something (both insane and
foreign?) outside the norms of what is deemed both reasonable and
customary within Arcadia. In a departure from Tasso’s representation
of the recalcitrant nymph who rejects love, Flori’s insanity is substan-
tively different from Silvia’s in Aminta where Dafne chides the nymph
for not accepting her childhood friend’s love:
Veder puoi con quanto affetto
e con quanti iterati abbracciamenti
la vite s’avviticchia al suo marito;
l’abete ama l’abete, il pino il pino,
l’orno per l’orno e per la salce il salceMLN 79
e l’un per l’altro faggio arde e sospira.
[...] Or tu da meno
esser vuoi de le piante,
per non esser amante?
Cangia, cangia consiglio,
pazzarella che sei.
(1.1.242–57)
In Dafne’s view, love is a natural force that animates the very universe
and dictates that each vine embrace her rightful “husband.” The
rejection of Aminta’s love is therefore unnatural and represents an
unreasonable or insane/unhealthy (insano) defiance of the natural
order of the universe. Indeed, in the experienced nymph’s view, an
inordinate resistance to love in the name of preserving chastity
dehumanizes those dissenting nymphs who would deny natural
instincts and self-fulfillment in the “abbracciamenti” of a male.
Whereas Dafne’s use of the cajoling vezzeggiativo diminishes the
charge of insanity against Silvia, the characterization of Flori’s state
undergoes no such attenuation. Until her “rinsavimento” in climactic
Act III, Flori as the “empia rubella” (Prologue) is “forsennata” (1.1),
“fuor di senno” (1.1), and a “crudel Ninfa ingrata, / [...] e pazza”
(2.1). Her actions likewise are a condemning expression of her “van
dolor” (1.1) where “errando folle” (1.1), “vaneggia” (1.1), and
“vanamente a l’impossibil dietro / si strugge” (1.1).12 Also unlike
Silvia’s situation, and significantly, Flori’s state of insanity as it
obsessively figures in Act I is not a symptom or result of her rejecting
love. It is instead the result of embracing love, but longing in vain for
the impossible. In Act I, scene i Flori cries out frequently as she drifts
in and out of a hallucinatory state that emphasizes the debilitating
irrationality of her love.
Cielo, chi mi nasconde
Colà tra quelle fronde
Il mio ben dolce e caro?
Invido marmo avaro?
(1v)13
12
Here I have identified my citations of the Flori according to act and scene to
illustrate how references to Flori’s insanity are clustered thematically at the beginning of
the drama. Thus, the parenthetical reference (1.1) directs the reader to Act I, scene i.
13
The dedicatory letters, cast of characters, and prologue of the Flori (2r–8v) are
paginated independently of the five acts of the play itself (1r –64v).80 LORI J. ULTSCH
The object of Flori’s desire, concealed as much by the tombstone over
which she cries as by the masculine gendered “il mio ben” and the
subsequent “solo, e gradito, obietto” is the nymph Amaranta: “lei / di
tutti i pensier miei / solo, e gradito, obietto” (1v).14 In the stock
attempted rape scene (1.6), the perplexed Sylvan’s appraisal of Flori’s
irresponsive limpness (“dogliosa e semiviva” [14r]) humorously sums
up the collective opinion of this impossible love: “ben pazza / se
dietro a Morte, e femina si strugge” (14v). The problem, as the first
act makes quite clear, is not that Flori refuses to accept Androgeo’s
love;15 it is rather that the object of her love—Amaranta—is perceived
by her pastoral companions of both sexes as unnatural and the act of
loving another nymph as misdirected, incomprehensible, and sterile.
In the pivotal scene of Flori’s textual rehabilitation that constitutes
her re-entrance into social order and gender appropriate behavior
(3.5), the intertextual echoes constructed by the typically Petrarchan
lamentations of this nymph could not be more ironic:
Io di meraviglia colma in forse
Resto, se pur fu vero, che a donna, e morta follemente dietro
Errassi un sì gran tempo.
(29v)
The twenty-six Diversi componimenti in lode dell’opera by male contempo-
raries (among them some accademici olimpici ) printed at the end of
the Flori include similar reactions to Campiglia’s highly unusual love
triangle. Muzio Manfredi’s sonnet concludes with the names of the
two nymphs and reminds the author that
Ma s’in te provi gli amorosi ardori
Ò s’altri per te have il petto ardente,
14
Mutini’s slip in agreement in the Dizionario biografico is quite amusing—“Flori
invaghito [sic.] di Amaranta, impazzisce per la morte di costei” (17: 542)—as it seems
to unwittingly reproduce the genre’s traditional emphasis on investigating forms of
heterosexual love. For futher information on Campiglia’s literary circle, see also the
entry on Curzio Gonzaga (57: 704–06).
15
The name itself of Flori’s suitor is also suggestive; he too is a character who will be
cured of his unreasonable love for Flori through a sacrificial rite to Diana. He will
ultimately marry Licori, Flori’s friend and confidante. The plot, therefore, does not
seek to heal Flori by marrying her to Androgeo-androgyne as some sort of mediator
between the genders; instead, one could say that the plot heals Flori by constructing an
unprecedented, “androgynous” form of marriage that mediates between patriarchal
society’s rules and Flori’s virginal desires. This alternative marriage is celebrated
between the protagonist and Alessi, the pastore straniero, a stranger introduced into
Arcadia.MLN 81
Sai che Donna per Donna, alfin non sente
Quel, che sentì, per AMARANTA FLORI.
Prospero Cattaneo likewise wonders
Ma come FLORI NINFA arde d’amore
D’AMARANTA pur NINFA? Ò di Natura
Strano, contrario, inusitato effetto.16
The process of healing Flori from her strangeness or contrariness and
bringing her to reason or order thus becomes twofold. Firstly, Flori
must overcome her unnatural and unproductive longing for the
nymph whose very name embodies the affective strength of their bond.
With this love rejected and her sanity restored through an offering of
“candida lana, [...] puro latte / [...] vezzose colombe, [...] fide
tortorelle e di fior vaghi [...] / odorate ghirlande” to Love and the
pastoral deities Pan and Pales in Act III, scene v (28r), the next issue
that must be addressed is bringing this rebellious nymph further into
line with social norms and praxes. With Androgeo’s suit rejected and
Serrano’s prudently unrevealed, a suitable match must step forward to
claim Flori. It is fitting that her future husband, Alessi, is a pastore
straniero.
Flori, as is to be expected, continues to resist the paradigmatic
happy ending envisioned, for example, in Il pastor fido (5.10) where
male voices invoke the goddess Hymen to legislate the union between
shepherd and nymph:
MIRTILLO.
O mio tesoro,
ancor non son sicuro, ancor i’ tremo;
nè sarò certo mai di possederti,
perfin che ne le case
non se’ del padre mio, fatta mia donna.
[...]
Vorrei pur ch’altra prova
mi fesse omai sentire
che ‘l mio dolce vegghiar non è dormire.
CORO DI PASTORI.
Vieni, santo Imeneo,
seconda i nostri voti e i nostri canti;
16
The twenty-eight pages of a total of twenty-eight poems (including the initial two
by the author) are not numbered, but Manfredi’s and Cattaneo’s compositions are,
respectively, the twentieth and the twenty-fifth.82 LORI J. ULTSCH
scòrgi i beati amanti,
l’uno e l’altro celeste semideo;
stringi il nodo fatal, santo Imeneo.
(1587–602)
Of course the fear of female infidelity that is a prime motivator of
action in Il pastor fido may explain Mirtillo’s haste to marry Amarillis,
but also the Aminta, without an overt reference to marriage, nonethe-
less celebrates bringing Silvia “viso a viso e bocca a bocca” with
Aminta (5.1. 1943), while Andreini’s La mirtilla revels not in the
traditional happy ending of just one couple, but three (5.6 and 5.7).
Flori instead, having overcome her unnatural love for another
nymph, resists the complete rehabilitation encoded in a traditional
marriage; she instead envisions a marriage with Alessi deemed as
inusitato as her original longing for Amaranta had been. Flori desires
Alessi chastely; indeed their marriage itself, like Flori’s virginity, is
another sacrifice to Diana and the ideals of the virgin goddess. With
significant placement at the conclusion of Act III, in scene vi, Flori
avows her complicated desires as she confesses to Licori her vision of
matrimonial bliss:
Lieta alhor potrei star ch’Alessi meco
Dedicandosi a Cinthia castamente
Di mutuo nodo avinto
In pari fiamme ardesse meco, alhora
Ben sarei lieta.
(35v)
Matrimony envisioned as a binding, “mutuo nodo” of virginity and
perpetual service to a divine force echoes Campiglia’s earlier words in
the Discorso where she reserved her highest praise for the “mutua
verginità, mutua servitù” and “mutua e perpetua fede” (7) of the
Virgin Mary and Joseph. This pivotal scene with its programmatic
expression of Flori’s desires ends without further conversation be-
tween the nymphs. It is only much later in Act V, scene i that Licori
will question Flori’s strange desire that closes Act III. By then, the
avowed desire has become a rapidly forming plan. As a concerned
friend and a conservative nymph, Licori confesses that if she were so
fortunate to have a shepherd who loved her, she would concede to
the “riposo [...] / e desiato pregio de gli Amanti” (51v) and thus
validate society’s expectations of her: “A Cinthia servo anch’io, ma di
seguire / Giovami il commun uso con sua pace” (51v). Licori thus
fears that Flori’s persistence in rejecting a traditional marriage isMLN 83
evidence of a desire to illicitly indulge her passion for Alessi.
Scandalized, Licori levels her accusation.
Perchè non vuoi legarti con Alessi
Co’l nodo d’Himeneo, se tanto l’ami?
Vorrai forse, vil Ninfa, a lui piacere
Con brame irregolate
Di vietato commercio?
(50v)
After Flori’s immediate reassurances that carnal pleasure is most
certainly not her goal, her explanation of her revolutionary view of
marriage continues to alienate Licori and defy the latter’s powers of
comprehension. Licori ultimately vents her ever-growing impatience
with her friend’s decidedly provocative and unfeminine behavior.
Licori. Hora t’intendo castamente amarlo.
Vuoi nè legarti in matrimonio seco?
Flori. Questo sol brama il cor, non potend’altro.
Licori. Ah quai pensieri insoliti, quai brame
T’invogliano anchor Flori? Io mi pensava
C’hormai fossi chiarita
Di correr dietro a l’impossibil sempre.
Qual havrem da gli Dei gratia ottenuta
Per te nel sacrificio, s’anco in guisa
Di pria ti struggi, e da te stessa à pena
Sceglier non sai lo stato tuo confuso?
Cotesti tuoi pensier troppo lontani
Fur mai sempre da quei d’ogn’altra Ninfa.
(50v–51r)
Licori then voices both the paradox of the text and the extent of
Flori’s social transgression:
Licori. Come non erri, se ad un tempo amando
Sprezzi quanto sol bramano gli Amanti?
E disiando fuggi d’ottenere
Quello che far sol ti potria felice?
(51r )
In effect, Flori’s socially transgressive errare would rewrite marriage
practices in the pastoral world and resolve the union between nymph
and shepherd as a satisfaction of chaste desire. Damiano’s early
prognostication (1.2), “Sana verrà; ma di repente sguardo / viril fia
ch’arda honestamente” (4r ), is nearing fulfillment.84 LORI J. ULTSCH
Far from not being able to choose her own state, as Licori had
charged, Flori in Act V succeeds in inventing and constructing the
very social role that she desires. In Act V marriage and neo-platonism
converge to construct an alternate destiny and identity for the once
recalcitrant and alienated, now loving, yet still chaste nymph. Indeed,
the last act of the drama foregrounds Flori’s ideal of a neo-platoni-
cally informed marriage. In lengthy passages where the learned
nymph discourses on her philosophical insights with Licori, ever the
eager listener and student of life, Flori reveals her project of an ideal
heterosexual union dedicated to religious devotion and learning.
Flori’s lessons to Licori may seem pat summaries that demonstrate a
Campiglia conversant in fashionable philosophical topics but there is
a significant spin on these commonly accepted ideas. Most impor-
tantly, Campiglia genders the neo-platonic gaze as feminine and thus
describes a thought process that contemplates the individual beauty
of the male object of desire as a reflection of and a conduit to the
divine. The feminine-gendered gaze meditates not upon the body of
Christ in order to contemplate the divine, but upon the earthly body
of the male beloved.17 In a lengthy disquisition, Flori explains to
Licori how her loving gaze penetrates and comprehends Alessi’s
earthly beauty in order to transcend it and unite through the
admiration of his sole with the Divine:
Avide luci di terreno Amante
Non mirar cosa mai con tanto diletto
Qual i miei lumi vagheggiaro il bello
Idolo mio sovran con gaudio immenso.
[...]
Ma non gia di beltate solamente
Licori esterna il mio desir s’appaga [...].
Passo a cosa più degna, penetrando
Di lui l’interno con la mente e indi
L’ali impiumando al vago mio desire
A’ sommi giri salgo [...].
La sua bellezza esterna vò che vaglia
Solo a guidarmi, o dolci gradi, al cielo
17
Rosi Braidotti emphasizes in her exploration of the theme of woman as “devalued
difference” that “to see is the primary act of knowledge and the gaze the basis of all
epistemic awareness,” powers that Western philosophical thought has not historically
attributed to women (80). Proclaiming herself a proprietor of the platonic gaze, Flori
thus engages actively in a debate with patriarchal logocentrism that would deny all
women subjectivity and the very ability to know and understand.MLN 85
Poichè a me stessa mille forme e mille
Pingo celesti in lui mirando fiso.
[...]
E del mio caro Alessi la bell’alma
Amo degn’opera del gran Maestro eterno.
A quella ben disio d’unirmi, e posso
Farlo senz’atto indegno, e ovunque sia
Ella congiunta starmi a tutte l’hore.
(51v –52r)
In this act of contemplation of the divine in a secular and chaste
context lies the essence of the lifestyle of the dimessa. Flori accepts
marriage, but rejects the traditional marriage in Arcadia that sanc-
tions sexual desire between a nymph and shepherd. She instead
authors a different marriage that in its platonic nature represents the
creation of a third state, an alternative life path. As Fonte’s example
in Il merito of “felice Corinna,” the young dimessa, whose freedom
allows her the opportunity to pursue “studi di lettere umane e divine”
(17–18), Licori remembers Flori’s inspiring answer to a question that
worried the nymph likewise devoted to a life of chastity (5.3). Seeing
her future before her and the virginity they had vowed to preserve,
Licori feared a lonely, childless old age full of regret:
E noi, che alfin corremmo,
Per alleggiar il pondo
Di quell’età che per se stessa e grave
Altro che pentimento?
E per scoscese rupi spini e bronchi
Dietro correndo inutilemente a fere?
E sorridendo al’hor tu rispondevi
Sian nostri figli le cose create
Dal divin nostro pelegrino ingegno,
Nè serva ad huom Angelica fattura.
(56v)
Although the Flori ends with a marriage, it is a decidedly nontradi-
tional one that celebrates not the future progeny of two flesh become
one but Flori’s creation “per mia voglia e non per sorte”18 of a state
18
This citation also comes from Fonte’s Il merito delle donne early in the dialogue when
Corinna the dimessa recites her sonnet-manifesto (18–19) for the other six women who
have gathered in the garden to discuss women’s merits and men’s faults. The sonnet
emphasizes how the dimessa creates her own destiny. She chooses a state of secular
celibacy which will allow her throughout life to avoid the “fallacia” of men, enjoy her
independence, concentrate on her studies, and pursue a pious existence.86 LORI J. ULTSCH
where the secular virgin can dedicate herself to learning and devo-
tion. Significantly, the plural possessive “nostri” includes Licori in this
project and aims19 to construct a community of women who subvert
traditional expectations regarding a women’s life paths and repro-
ductive roles and instead value women’s capacity to self-reproduce
through their intellectual activities.
Legitimate Daughters and Disobedient Texts
Campiglia states in her dedicatory letters to the Flori, affectionately
called “questa mia figlia, vera figlia, e naturale” (6r), her preference
in art as in life to act as a different woman, “procurando piu tosto
d’allontanarmi dall’ordinario costume donnesco” (3v). Flori as an
unruly yet legitimate daughter of the intellect challenges the custom-
ary resolution of the pastoral and explores the genre’s boundaries
between the socially licit and illicit through a privileging of the
nymph’s point of view and a voicing of provocative subject positions
and social realities for women. The overwhelming presence in the
Flori of such themes as the refusal of marriage, the preference for
intellectual over biological self-reproduction, same-sex female desire,
the female neo-platonic gaze, the celebration of celibacy as the
refinement of the intellect, and the praise of virginity and devotion
combine to form a suggestive pastoral without precedent in Italy.
Coupled with the socio-historical context of its genesis, the work also
gives voice to significant social changes in women’s lives evident in
the late sixteenth century. Devotion, the third state, chastity, and a
clear preference for intellectual pursuits are the tenets by which
Campiglia re-orders the pastoral landscape and outlines an opposi-
tional construction of society and women’s gender roles within it.
If pastoral’s discursive task is to reimpose order on a world rendered
chaotic by the introduction of the destabilizing force of love, Campiglia’s
pastoral creates a new order by introducing further destabilization.
The pastoral setting, as Clubb theorizes with references to Cucchetti’s
La pazzia and Campiglia’s Flori as her examples, is “a contemplative
space where self-knowledge is acquired or a celestial design glimpsed,
where the sick mind may be healed (perhaps by passing through
madness, an illuminating furor), and where humanity may be put in
harmony with all nature, including its own” (164). In the process of
19
Licori, however, opts for a traditional marriage with Androgeo.MLN 87
harmonizing Flori’s strange desires with the pastoral world, Campiglia
exerts pressure not only upon the accepted boundaries of the genre
but also upon the very coordinates of a pastoral landscape mapped by
a patriarchal gaze that surveys and surveils in order to pronounce s’ei
lice, piace. Operating between the poles of female devotion and will,
the Flori arrives at a compromise solution that in its insistence upon
platonic marriage ultimately denies the pastoral genre its celebration
of a socially sanctioned heterocosm populated by consenting shep-
herds and nymphs. Campiglia’s protagonist accepts marriage yet
rewrites tradition through projecting onto the marriage bond a third
state of secular celibacy that emphasizes piety and learning. In the new
Arcadia constituted by the Flori, a specifically female voice claims both
authority and an overdetermined measure of self-representation and
self-reproduction. As we have seen, however, Campiglia’s protagonist
is still obligated to come to partial terms with the rites and desires of
social legitimization, the “commun uso” to which Licori alludes in Act
V. Ultimately, Flori does marry.
In contrast to the Flori and its partial capitulation to normalizing
social practices, Campiglia’s eclogue Calisa (1589), written—ironi-
cally—as an epithalamium,20 effectively presents no challenge to a
same-sex love perceived as forsennato, vano, pazzo. Its recognition of a
female, independent, and (pro)creative power goes one step further
than the Flori. The protagonist is once again Flori, the object of her
desire, a living nymph, is not safely distanced by an “invido marmo
avaro.” Rather than submitting to a social redemption even partial,
Flori succeeds in convincing her male interlocutor, Edreo, of the
measure and irreversibility of her love for Calisa.
The eclogue opens with Edreo alone in a pastoral landscape of
beech, pine, elm and ash trees, musing over how he can convince
Flori to stop loving Calisa:
Et io lo saprò far, ch’ingegno et arte
E parole ho ben atte! Quinci intorno
Mira quanti orni et olmi e pini e faggi
Inscritti di sua mano: ah Flori, Flori,
Pur vanamente amando, ancor ti struggi,
Ancor di reo destin preda ti fai!
(vv. 1–6)21
20
The Calisa was written in celebration of the marriage between Giampaolo Lupi,
Pallavicino’s son, and Beatrice degli Obizzi.
21
Unless otherwise noted, all citations of the Calisa refer to Perrone’s 1996 edition.88 LORI J. ULTSCH
As Edreo awaits Flori who will sing the epithalamium with him to
celebrate the marriage of Bice and Lico (son of Calisa), he anticipates
that the rite will be the propitious occasion “ond’io possa anco / con
mie ragioni et arti lei ritrarre / da questi vani et infelici amori” (vv.
34–36). Upon Flori’s arrival in verse thirty-seven, Edreo tries without
success for some eighty verses22 to dissuade her from loving Calisa.
Flori responds with repeated defenses of that same love:
Edreo. Ah, Flori, non è amor, più tosto
D’ostinato pensiero è calda brama
Che da te ti disgiunge: Amor, ch’è dio,
Oprar cosa non può men che perfetta.
Flori. Perfetto è ben di questo cor l’affetto
Et Amor che l’accende è dio perfetto.
(vv. 80–85)
Ultimately, no compromise emerges as it had previously in the case of
Flori’s love for Amaranta. The love labeled “imperfect” by a dominant
ideological system of binary oppositions that reads “different” as
“abnormal” is not perfected here according to any normalizing
“commun uso” (Flori 51v).
Flori and Edreo quickly abandon their performance to instead
debate Flori’s love for Calisa, Lico’s mother. That this Flori is indeed
the same character of Campiglia’s pastoral drama is revealed when
the nymph apostrophizes “Deh, caro Alessi mio, ove or ti stai? / Chè
intorno qual solea sonar s’udrebbe / dolce al tuo canto ogni pendice
e colle” (vv. 163–65). The juxtaposition of the imperfect and present
tenses and the use of the temporal deictic “or[a]” effectively absent
Flori’s consort from the pastoral landscape. We can only assume that
the “pastore straniero” has gone back to his homeland. Flori, it would
seem, is a repeat offender to gender order whose amatory recidivism
continues to call for immediate intervention and rehabilitation. In
the space opened by Alessi’s absence, Campiglia thus cues that the
Calisa revisits the ending of her pastoral drama where the female
intellectual impulse, desire for celibacy, and engagement with the
divine resulted in a bond of platonic marriage in the pastoral world.
Although the institution of marriage in the Flori was indeed a strange
22
The entire work contains only 292 verses; the epithalamium to Bice and Lico
occupies only verses 227–62. Quantitatively, the discussion of Flori’s love for Calisa
dominates the text. The singing of the epithalamium for the couple thus seems a thinly
veiled pretext for the successful apology of Flori’s love for Calisa.MLN 89
or defamiliarized one within the pastoral economy, mediation and
compromise nevertheless resulted in the socially sanctioned and
familiar construction of woman and man as wife and husband. In the
Flori, the nymph must sacrifice her love for Amaranta and admits its
crazed strangeness, a necessary precursor to staging a “coppia unqua
veduta” joined in platonic marriage (Prologo 8r). In the eclogue-
epithalamium, however, the female object of Flori’s love is not absented
by death, nor is there a male suitor waiting in the wings to assert his
claim over Flori. The platonic union instituted between shepherd
and nymph in the Flori thus no longer obtains as a new harmony and
order are created to mediate between Flori’s desires and society’s
conventions. Rather than submitting even partially to the “comun
uso” of marriage with a shepherd, Flori in the Calisa succeeds in
convincing Edreo of the merit of her love for Calisa.
Can this declaration of “love” spoken by Flori-Campiglia be read as
evidence of lesbianism, as Perrone has asserted in her presentation of
the Calisa?23 In the dedicatory letter of the Flori to “Calisa,” the
Marchioness Isabella Pallavicino Lupi, Campiglia writes that the work
is a “dimostration dell’affetto, & della riverenza ch’io debbo al
singolar merito suo” and further explains her reasons for choosing
Pallavicino: “[L]e hò dedicato questa mia opera Pastorale [...] per
sodisfar in parte all’obligo mio de i favori fattimi da lei più volte, &
finalmente per non mostrarmi senza giuditio, havendo saputo sceglier
Donna Eccellentissima a’ tempi nostri non solo per nobiltà di sangue,
& per grandezza di stato, ma per magnanimità, & per valore” (2r –2v).
Campiglia writes the Calisa on the occasion of the marriage between
Isabella’s son, Giovan Paolo Lupi, and Beatrice degli Obizzi. Palla-
vicino’s name, however, appears not only as paratext in Campiglia’s
oeuvre. An encomium in the form of an acrostic is delivered by Alessi
in the last act of the Flori.24 In the Calisa, Flori reads Calisa’s name in
23
Perrone’s assertion seems founded on conjecture more than evidence. She
interprets Campiglia’s affiliations with women’s religious communities in Vicenza
“come una sorta di passaporto per la libertà, il mezzo più idoneo per riscattare la
propria identità sessuale affermando, al contempo, le proprie doti intellettuali” (32).
24
Alessi, Flori’s husband, delivers the acrostic in a series of encomiastic verses
followed by a similar praising of Curzio Conzaga, the second dedicatee of the Flori:
I l Rè de l’universo
S celse, tra mille, una sovrana, e chiara
A lma, e qui la ripose, ove di rara
B eltà l’essempio scorto, huom sia converso
E con la mente al cielo, e con l’affetto.
L e gratie hà seco tutte, e come obbietto90 LORI J. ULTSCH
a carving on a tree and exclaims “la mia dea, ché in guISA BELLA e
saggia / è di Cinthia gradito nome impresso” (vv. 16–17).25 This
repeated praise of Isabella as virtuous, beautiful, and wise attests
instead to a reading of the “love” between Flori-Campiglia and Calisa-
Pallavicino as an intellectually and artistically significant bond that
links Campiglia to a noble, generous, and virtuous female patron. In
the text’s overt celebration of Flori’s “love” for another nymph, the
Calisa relegates the celebration of the actual marriage to an order of
second importance in favor of covertly celebrating the intellectual
bond between two women. By repeatedly interrupting the epithalamium
that the composition ostensibly celebrates, the Calisa instead cel-
ebrates a union between women that pre-exists the text and enables
the text’s very existence. Ultimately, this à clef eclogue is an elegantly
constructed compliment to Pallavicino whereby the marchioness
emerges as inspiring muse, generous patron, and object of devotion.
At the close of the Calisa, Edreo sings an unexpected epithalamium
as he confers upon Flori’s love for Calisa his imprimatur of
acceptability:
Oimè Flori infelice, hor ben vegg’io
Che aureo quadrello fu che fatal piaga
Ti fece dentro al cor, cui magic’arte,
Sanar non può con sufumigi, o carmi.
Dunque ama, Flori, e spera un giorno forse,
Benchè strano è ‘l tuo amor, ne corrai frutto.
(vv. 118–26)
The word “frutto” is significant in that it performs an intertextual
recantation of the previous judgment of sterility imposed upon Flori’s
love for Amaranta: “ben pazza / se dietro a Morte / e femina si
strugge” (14v). The bond between two women has already borne
fruit, however, as the text itself stands as the fruit of “le cose create /
Dal divin nostro pelegrino ingegno” (Flori 56v). In effect, Edreo’s
epithalamium-within-the-epithalamium disassociates Flori’s love for Calisa
from sterility and insanity as he recognizes its potential productivity.
L ucido i cori alluma, e ‘l TREBBIA impara
A risuonar con la pura onda alterna,
PALLAVICINA nostra gloria eterna.
(5.3, 61r)
25
Perrone points out this literary device of Provençal origin in her notes to the Calisa
(76).MLN 91
After the blessing and sanction encoded in this performative speech
act, Edreo and Flori finally return to their interrupted singing of the
epithalamium for Bice and Lico that occupies but a small portion of
the text (vv. 227–62). Flori once again breaks from their duet of
wishes for the couple to celebrate her love for Calisa (vv. 263–72), “il
mio bel sol, l’idolo mio” (v. 267). As nymph and shepherd depart in
search of Ileo to join their singing of the unfinished epithalamium,
Flori’s celebration of Calisa closes the text. Her suggestive counter-
point lingers over the Arcadian landscape and authors an appropri-
ate happy ending for a nymph whose “pensier troppo lontani / fur
mai sempre da quei d’ogn’altra Ninfa” (Flori 51r).
Hofstra University
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