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Friedrich Nietzsche A Philosophical Biography 1st
Edition Julian Young Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Julian Young
ISBN(s): 9780521871174, 0521871174
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 4.68 MB
Year: 2010
Language: english
WRITING BELOVEDS

Humanist Petrarchism and the Politics of Gender

This page intentionally left blank
AILEEN A. FENG

Writing Beloveds
Humanist Petrarchism
and the Politics of Gender

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

Toronto Buffalo London
© University of Toronto Press 2017
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
Printed in the U.S.A.

ISBN 978-1-4875-0077-1

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper

with vegetable-based inks.

Toronto Italian Studies

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Feng Aileen A., author

Writing beloveds : humanist Petrarchism and the politics of gender /
Aileen A. Feng.

(Toronto Italian studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4875-0077-1 (cloth)

1. Petrarca, Francesco, 1304–1374 – Influence. 2. Italian poetry –

16th century – History and criticism. 3. Petrarchism. 4. Humanism in
literature. 5. Politics in literature. 6. Sex roles in literature. I. Title
II. Series: Toronto Italian studies

PQ4103.F45 2016   851'409   C2016-904897-7

This book has been published with the financial assistance of The Provost’s
Author Support Fund at the University of Arizona, and a Book Subvention
Award from the Medieval Academy of America.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its

publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts
Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

Funded by the Financé par le

Government gouvernement
of Canada du Canada
For Paul
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

Abbreviations ix
Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 3

Part I: Intellectual Masculinity and the Female Intellect in Human-

ist Petrarchism

1 Women of Stone: Gender and Politics in the Petrarchan World 17

2 In Laura’s Shadow: Gendered Dialogues and Humanist Petrarchism

in the Fifteenth Century 68

3 Laura Speaks: Sisterhood, Amicitia, and Marital Love in the Female

Latin Petrarchist Writings of the Fifteenth Century 106

Part II: Pietro Bembo and the Legacy of Humanist Petrarchism

4 Theorizing Gender: Nation Building and Female Mythology

in the Ciceronian Quarrel 135

5 Politicizing Gender: Bembo’s Private and Public Petrarchism 163

Afterword 209
viii Contents

Notes 213
Bibliography 241
Index 257
Abbreviations

EpGr Poliziano, Angeli Politiani liber epigrammatum Graecorum

Fam. Petrarca, Familiares (Rerum familiarium libri)
RVF Petrarca, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta
Rime Bembo, Rime (1530)
This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgments

It gives me great pleasure to thank and acknowledge all of the people

and various communities who have supported me in the writing of this
book. First, I must thank those who have supported me from the earli-
est stages of my career. Daniela Bini first introduced me to Petrarch’s
poetry as an undergraduate, igniting a passion in me that would for-
ever change the course of my professional career. JoAnn DellaNeva
opened my eyes to the richness of the Pléiade poets and to Petrarch’s
influence beyond the Italian borders. I am indebted to Albert Ascoli,
Steven Botterill, Tim Hampton, and Barbara Spackman for their guid-
ance and all manner of advice during my doctoral studies and beyond.
Likewise, my fellow Berkeley italianisti were a source of continual intel-
lectual stimulation, while providing much-needed social diversion and
support at just the right moments: Andre Barashkov, Angela Matilde
Capodivacca, Jonathan Combs-Schilling, Susan Gaylard, Amyrose Gill,
Janaya Lasker-Ferretti, Tony Martire, Scott Millspaugh, Tamao Nakahara,
Jessica Otey, Marco Ruffini, Nora Stoppino, Silvia Valisa, Maurizio
Vito, Karina Xavier, and Irene Zanini-Cordi. A special grazie del cuore
to Stephanie Malia Hom, Rhiannon Welch, and Rebecca Falkoff – my
muliebris respublica and partners in crime. My studies at Berkeley were
enhanced by other close friends and colleagues whom I still hold dear:
Mark and Kimberly Allison, Penelope Anderson, Craig Davidson,
Alan Drosdick, Sarah Engel, Mia Fuller, Stephanie Green, Kristine Ha,
Slavica Naumovska, and Rob Schipano.
While writing a monograph is a solitary and often isolating expe-
rience, I greatly benefited from the many conversations I had about
this project with trusted friends and colleagues alike. I would like to
xii Acknowledgments

thank Susan Gaylard and Nora Stoppino, who provided invaluable cri-
tiques of my book project in the early stages of the writing process. Unn
Falkeid, Faith Harden, Paul Hurh, Silvia Valisa, and Gur Zak read and
meticulously commented on chapter drafts. The two anonymous read-
ers for the University of Toronto Press gave generous and thoughtful
feedback that helped me to see more clearly the project from an external
perspective. Their insights have undoubtedly made this book better. I
am also grateful to Beppe Cavatorta, David Lummus, and Maurizio
Vito for their help with my translations, though any errors remain my
own. My Hellenist colleague and friend John Bauschatz provided the
English translations of Poliziano’s and Alessandra Scala’s Greek epi-
grams, which are part of our current collaboration on an English trans-
lation and edition of Poliziano’s Greek poetry. Finally, working with
the University of Toronto Press has been one of the best editorial ex-
periences I could imagine, thanks to the expert guidance of Suzanne
Rancourt. She has been a great supporter of this project from the begin-
ning, an indispensable interlocutor during the revisions process, and a
steadying hand throughout. Special thanks go to Anne Laughlin, who
shepherded this book through production, Margaret Allen for her keen
eye and invaluable revisions during copy-editing, and TextFormations
for building the index to this book.
I could not have survived the Arizona summers and the so-called
“dry heat” without the support of my earliest Tucson friends and col-
leagues – Megan Campbell, Andrea Dallas, Juan Diaz, Allison Dushane,
Mike and Laura Lippman, Clint McCall, Ander Monson, Manuel
Muñoz, and Jonathon Reinhardt – who share in my every success. My
colleagues in the Department of French and Italian at the University
of Arizona have been a continual source of support for me. I want to
especially thank Lise Leibacher – senior faculty mentor par excellence,
cherished colleague, and friend – who has had my back from the first
day I stepped onto campus and whose own professional successes in-
spire me. Je te remercie du fond du cœur.
I would like to thank my family for their immeasurable support and
love: my parents, David and Liana Astorga Feng, who instilled in me
a passion for reading and other cultures; and my brother and sister-­in-
law, Nick and Meredith Feng, and twin nieces, Harper and Hayden, for
keeping me grounded and constantly entertained. Rob and Tracy Hurh
Prescott have been my strongest supporters from among my in-laws,
and for that I thank them.
 Acknowledgments xiii

Finally, Paul Hurh has been on this journey with me since we first
met on the steps of Dwinelle Hall in the summer of 2002. He read more
of this manuscript than should ever be asked of an academic spouse,
without giving it a second thought. I will never be able to fully express
my gratitude for his unwavering support, optimism, and love. He is my
North Star, in more ways than one.
This page intentionally left blank
WRITING BELOVEDS

Humanist Petrarchism and the Politics of Gender

This page intentionally left blank
Introduction

Itaque tibi spondeo fide Athica … tibi iuro me tuam dulcem memoriam inter
arcana pectoris servare.

I promise you, therefore, with Attic faith – in the event you would not believe
me without this vow – by wind and earth I swear to you that I preserve your
sweet memory within the secret places of my heart.1
Lauro Quirini to Isotta Nogarola, mid-1400s

Sollicitata precibus tuis, non potui non obtemperare tibi, Germana, cujus ad
amatum vultu[m], atque ordinatos mores ante animu[m] semper fero.

While I have worried about your request, I could not refuse to oblige you, sister,
whose dear face and orderly ways I always carry with me in my heart.2
Laura Cereta to Nazaria Olympica, 1486

La vostra immagine, come che io l’abbia sempre nel cuore, pure ho io carissima
sopra quanti doni ebbi giammai.

Your image, despite my always carrying it in my heart, I truly cherish more

than any other gift I have ever received.3
Pietro Bembo to Maria Savorgnan, 1500

I carry your image in my heart. In three very different letters of early

modern Italy, one to an intellectual peer, another to a friend, and the
third to a lover, this singular conceit emerges as a point of intersection
and intertextual resonance, pursuing different aims through a single
4 Introduction

model: Italian poet laureate Francesco Petrarca’s lyrical model of un-

requited love. When Petrarch described his beloved Laura as “’l bel
viso leggiadro che depinto / porto nel petto, e veggio ove ch’io miri”
(“that lovely smiling face, which I carry painted in my breast and see
wherever I look”),4 he turned the figure of the unattainable beloved
into the ubiquitous source of poetic inspiration. This conversion – turn-
ing person to image, image to possession, and possession to projection
– underlies Petrarch’s tremendous influence on Renaissance poetics
throughout Europe. Thus when these three letters invoke that trope,
they also elicit other defining characteristics of Petrarch’s love poetry:
the silent, chaste beloved’s war against the wounded poet-lover, the
tension between sacred and profane love, the paradoxical state of in-
ner turmoil that can only be expressed through oxymora, and idealized
female beauty and virtue. I carry your image in my heart is a declaration
of Petrarchan love and all that it entails.
In each of the three epistolary excerpts above, the imitation of this
iconic Petrarchan trope is uniquely unexpected. The fifteenth-­century
humanists Lauro Quirini (1420–75) and Laura Cereta (1469–99) trans-
late vernacular lyric verses into Ciceronian Latin and apply them to
their respective social realities. Yet the humanist epistle, a genre formed
to showcase the author’s command of classical studies and Latin com-
position, is an unconventional place to find lyrical professions of de-
votion that stem from the vernacular tradition. The original intent of
Quirini’s letter was to praise Isotta Nogarola’s humanistic accomplish-
ments and the female intellect and to establish an intellectual corre-
spondence with the learned woman. Yet, in doing so he portrays a
humanist Nogarola alongside a lyrical Petrarchan one, describing a
curious hybrid figure who can both inspire love and letters and also
speak back to him as an intellectual peer. She becomes his “interactive
muse,” a speaking, reasoning, and intellectually attainable beloved.5
Quirini portrays her as such despite the fact that the social context of
Latin humanism – intellectual exchange between educated men and
women – is completely foreign to the Petrarchan original, which reifies
the one-way relationship between the sexes: Petrarch speaks; Laura
is silent. Such surprising adaptation may show the flexibility of the
Petrarchan conceit, but it also opens new questions. To what degree
can the figure of the Petrarchan beloved be lifted from its context with-
out bringing along with it all of the associated connotations? How
could Latin humanism incorporate Petrarch’s vernacular lyricism, and
furthermore, why would it want to?
 Introduction 5

Similar questions might be raised by Laura Cereta’s repurposing of

the trope, although to a much different end. Cereta’s letter is an auto-
biographical account of how she became a learned woman. She holds
dear not just the image of her friend – Nazaria Olympica, a nun – but
also her “orderly ways.” Like Petrarch and Quirini before her, she draws
on the theme of inspiration but transforms Olympica's face into a sym-
bol of exemplary work ethic, rather than a symbol of desire or classi-
cal female virtues. Cereta’s use of “germana” (sister) in her address
to Olympica plays with the notion of sisterhood in two ways. First,
taken as a title, it refers to Olympica’s vocation as a nun, which includes
a vow of chastity – a classical female virtue present in the figure of
Petrarch’s Laura. Second, taken as a term of sorority, it creates an intel-
lectual kinship between the two women. This sense of female kinship
replaces the paradigm of unrequited love, but the Petrarchan trope still
communicates a strong feeling of admiration and devotion. For both
Quirini and Cereta, then, Petrarch’s lyric offered a linguistic and tropic
model that could be adapted to fit their needs. Yet, in such adaptation,
both also become sites of tension between the male-centred logic in-
ternal to the Petrarchan lyric and the early attempts to exemplify the
intellectual woman in the humanist tradition.
At the turn of the century Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) – widely con-
sidered to be the “father of Petrarchism” – radically adapts the trope
by applying it to his lover, Maria Griffoni Savorgnan. First, he discards
the one-way nature of Petrarchan love by depicting requited love. The
“immagine” (image) he describes in his letter has a double referent:
Savorgnan had sent him a portrait of herself, which replicated the im-
age he already carried in his heart. The “dono” (gift) that he holds above
all others is thus both her love (symbolized by the image in his heart)
and the physical portrait she has sent. Such reciprocal exchange voids
the Petrarchan trope of the fundamentally unidirectional paradigm of
Petrarchan love and desire founded in the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta.
Furthermore, Bembo’s allusion to Petrarch broaches a new form of pro-
to-nationalist literary imitation. While Bembo’s imitation of Petrarch’s
poetry in a private prose letter belies the staunchly Ciceronian posi-
tion he will take in his argument against cross-genre imitation in the
1512–13 Ciceronian Quarrel, it looks forward to the most ambitious
linguistic project of his career: the 1525 Prose della volgar lingua.6 There
he publicly called for new Italian models of imitation, replacing Vergil
with Petrarch in poetry, and Cicero with Boccaccio in prose. Bembo’s
codification of Italian grammar and orthography based on the writings
6 Introduction

of Petrarch and Boccaccio was an attempt to politically unite Italy un-

der a Petrarch-inspired “national” language. In the Savorgnan letters,
we see that in the early stages of his career he had been privately ex-
perimenting with the real-world applicability of Petrarchan rhetoric in
his epistolary correspondence with his lover.
While the letters by Quirini, Cereta, and Bembo all share a com-
mon Petrarchan trope, the more striking connection is the efficacy with
which each writer adapts Petrarchan rhetoric to diverse social – rather
than exclusively poetic – discourses. These early examples occur dur-
ing a historical sea-change within Italian letters. With the advent of
neo-Latin female humanists in the fifteenth century, classical erudition
and oratory were no longer restricted to the male, elite sphere. The fe-
male humanist letterbooks display a level of erudition that places them
among those of the leading male intellectuals of the century. How­
ever, there were no classical models for male-female or female-female
intellectual correspondence. Thus, the frequency with which Petrarchan
tropes are translated into humanist Latin leads us to several fundamen-
tal questions: How is Petrarchan imitation in real correspondence dif-
ferent from its poetic counterpart? How does this unconventional use
of Petrarchan imitation change the contours of the later poetic move-
ment? In what ways did the language of Petrarch mediate gendered
dialogues, and what can that mediation tell us about identity politics
and early modern cultural discourses? This book answers these ques-
tions by identifying and analysing what I call humanist Petrarchism:
the appropriation and translation of Petrarchan poetry into Latin hu-
manist prose during the fifteenth century.
The influence of Petrarch’s poetry in sixteenth-century Europe has
been widely accepted. Petrarchism – the poetic imitation of Petrarch’s
lyric poetry – swept across the continent and even across the ocean to
the Americas, gaining a cultural capital never before seen in Western
­literature. The sonnet form, topos of unrequited love, and other Pe­
trarchan conventions were adopted by poets like Shakespeare, John
Donne, Pierre de Ronsard, and Garcilaso de Vega. While most studies
of Petrarchism focus on vernacular poetic or other literary imitations,
Writing Beloveds recovers the influentially gendered inflections of the
earliest form of Petrarchan imitation – humanist Petrarchism in Latin
– by recovering texts not normally associated with the conventions
of poetic Petrarchism. This includes men’s prose works to and about
women, women’s responses to them, and women’s writing to each
other. The chapters within this study thus consider not only poetry but
 Introduction 7

linguistic treatises, debates on imitation, prose representations of gen-

der, and epistolary correspondence in Latin and Italian. By discover-
ing the literary motifs that span the gaps between women’s and men’s
writing about gender, we can map how certain figures in Petrarch’s
writing transmitted gendered ideas of power that signalled an anxiety
concerning the rising place of women as intellectual interlocutors, pub-
lic figures, and, eventually, patrons of the arts. By focusing on fifteenth-
century humanist Petrarchism, and the poetic framework through which
men and women learned to engage with each other intellectually (and
otherwise), this book reveals how humanist Petrarchism transmitted
and reinforced prescriptive ideals about gendered identities and per-
formance,7 while at the same time contesting these very ideals.
Writing Beloveds concentrates on the age of neo-Latin humanism be-
tween Petrarch and the Renaissance – a period that just precedes the
conventional periodization of Petrarchism. It thus expands the linguis-
tic range, historical chronology, and social functions of Petrarchan imi-
tation that begins in the century after Petrarch’s death and then takes
off as a global phenomenon in the high Renaissance. One primary
objective is to reconstruct the political influence of writing on gender
as Petrarchan rhetoric was deployed in real correspondence between
educated men and women in the fifteenth century. In telling the sto-
ry of how humanist Petrarchism emerges as a model for male-female
interaction that is at hand for male humanists seeking to frame their
new relation to learned women, this book focuses attention on the com-
plex struggle to determine the significance of gender in the full range
of writing within that period. It shows how Petrarchan poetic conven-
tions were part of a social discourse that played a fundamental role in
prescribing gendered identities in relation to power and agency. The
socio-political consequences of humanist Petrarchism profoundly in-
fluenced Pietro Bembo’s own Petrarchan poetry and linguistic treatises,
placing him in the middle, rather than at the beginning, of the history
of Petrarchism, broadly conceived.
This book engages with three distinct fields – Petrarchism, the in-
tellectual history of early modern women, and gender and women’s
studies – yet bridges them in a new way by revealing how humanist
Petrarchism mediates gendered interactions. It reveals a long history
of Petrarchism that is founded on its role as a cultural rather than ex-
clusively poetic discourse, with real consequences for emerging pro­
to-nationalistic identities in the Italian Renaissance. Within the field of
Petrarchism studies, two distinct bodies of scholarship have attempted
8 Introduction

to answer similar questions regarding the politics of gender: the poetic

movement’s role in the growth of early modern women’s writing, and
the political uses of the Petrarchan sonnet. In the first approach, schol-
ars have investigated how women adapted the Petrarchan form to the
female voice. Ann Rosalind Jones’s groundbreaking study, The Currency
of Eros, highlights the ways in which women’s writing between 1540
and 1620 contested gender ideologies and male-authored literary con-
ventions in England, France, and Italy.8 She credits Petrarchism with
liberating female voices and with levelling the playing field for women.
Writing Beloveds expands and builds upon the work of Jones by account-
ing for gender in greater context and widening the gendered view of
Petrarchism to include not only lyric works by women writers but also
the considerable correspondence between men and women. In doing
so, it tells the story of how humanist Petrarchism emerges as a model
for male-female interaction, and how these writings constructed and
reinforced prescriptive ideals about women’s behaviour. The conclu-
sions of this book are in dialogue with the research of Deanna Shemek,
who has studied the ways in which issues of femininity and the threat
of women’s “wayward” behaviour for male identity and social order
reached far beyond the border of didactic and prescriptive treatises to
popular and canonical literature, the visual arts, public festivals, and
actual legal proceedings.9 This study seeks to explore the boundaries
between prescriptive literature and canonical literature by investigat-
ing how, just as Renaissance Petrarchism became a transnational po-
etic discourse, humanist Petrarchism initially provided the framework
within which men and women could define a new intellectual relation-
ship that did not ignore the longer literary tradition that had defined
the sexes in binary terms, but rather adapted it to the new social reality
of women writers confronting early modern Europe.
Writing Beloveds also engages with a second critical trend in Petrar­
chism studies: the concern over how Petrarchan poetry could be adapt-
ed to address – directly or indirectly – social and political concerns.
The ground for this question is explored primarily in Roland Greene’s
Unrequited Conquests, which exposed the use of Petrarchism in the co-
lonialist project of exploring the Americas.10 William J. Kennedy’s more
wide-reaching study of the role of the Petrarchan sonnet in express-
ing national sentiments uses a poststructuralist frame to show how the
Petrarchan sonnet was adapted to express national sentiments while de­
fining social class, political power, and national identity in Italy, France,
England, Spain, and Germany.11 More recently, Konrad Eisenbichler
 Introduction 9

has examined how Sienese female poets in the 1530s to 1550s used the
Petrarchan sonnet to express their political opinions at a tumultuous
time in Siena’s history.12 The women examined by Eisenbichler dis-
cussed political events in the safe, discursive space of the lyric, divorced
from Italian courtly culture, unlike their male courtier counterparts. In
this light, his study both expands the work of Greene and Kennedy
while also providing an interesting, gendered counterpart to the work
being done in the Italian academy on the political role of Petrarchism
in various court cultures. Recent work by Domenico Chiodo has shown
how courtiers, advisers, and secretaries used the Petrarchan sonnet to
record less-than-flattering accounts of the political nemeses of their pa-
trons, such as Francesco Maria Molza’s poem about Charles V’s public
humiliation at the hand of Ippolito de’Medici.13 Stefano Cremonini has
also recently focused on the role of Petrarchism in paying homage to
one’s patron in the funerary verses written in honour of members of
such notable families as the Medici and the Sforza.14 He has noted the
contamination of the archetypical “donna-angelicata” figure made fa-
mous by Petrarch (and Dante before him) and the deceased patrons,
although he does not extend his analysis to gender politics.
While closing the gap between poetry and politics broadens the
field of Petrarchism, all of these studies’ focus on overtly political po-
etry still reinforces an often-held distinction between two categories of
Petrarch’s poetry: amorous, apolitical poems devoted to his beloved
Laura and political poems addressing patronage, Italian politics, and
the church. Writing Beloveds contributes to this rich body of scholarship
by showing how even, and indeed especially, the amorous tradition of
Petrarchan rhetoric was always already political from the perspective
of agency. One cannot hold apart the amorous and the political poems
when, as this book shows, Petrarch’s poetry often conflated the figures
of his patrons with that of the beloved. Thus, the legacy of Petrarchism
illuminates and extends the politics of gender that can already be found
in the RVF. By tracing the history of Petrarch’s construction of gender
– power associated with men, and a lack of agency with women –
through its imitation in correspondence between intellectual men and
women in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, this book uncovers an-
other kind of political work of the poetic tradition.
Considering the deep historical relations of gender and politics in
Petrarchism may reframe questions about the intellectual history of
women and feminism, identity politics, and gendered power struc-
tures. Recently, there has been a renewed interest in re-evaluating the
10 Introduction

networks of men who helped women enter into humanist intellectual

circles and the publishing world – an attempt to correct earlier theories
about men’s roles in marginalizing women. Diana Robin was the first
to look at the simultaneous emergence of female-led literary salons and
“virtual” salons of women writers created by male editors of antholo-
gies, exposing the complex network of men and women involved in
publishing women.15 Sarah G. Ross has taken a similar approach to the
broader field of early modern feminism by examining the role of the
“intellectual family” that enabled women to publish their work and
emerge publicly as learned women under the protection of their father’s
households.16 Although traditionally the history of women’s writ­ing
had been seen through the lens of an exclusionary division – the intellec-
tual woman existed either because she rebelled against men, or because
of men’s support – both Robin and Ross collapse the two accounts to
show how the larger cultural rebellion was enabled by complex net-
works of men working in conjunction with women. Robin and Ross
show how feminism, the female intellectual tradition, and the concep-
tion of femininity itself emerge from historically specific institutional
collaborations between men and women. My work builds upon this
by showing not only how Petrarchism allowed women to write but
moreover how the political dimensions of its gendered poetics deter-
mined what “woman” and “women’s writing” would mean, providing
a crucial textured account of the origins of early modern conceptions
of gender. The outcome of this study is thus a more fraught account
of feminist politics and the intellectual history of women’s writing,
one that complicates the narrative of the birth of feminism by showing
how female empowerment was from the start bound up in questions
of male identity.
Scholarship in Italian studies has generally treated masculinity stud-
ies and women’s studies as separate trajectories within the larger field
of gender studies, with each methodology following the gender of the
author under examination. Women writers are examined as having dis-
tinctly “feminine” voices and issues separate from those confronted by
their male peers who, even when taking a proto-feminist stance in their
writing, are understood always to be working within a masculine, pa-
triarchal system. Traditionally, Italian gender studies as a field has thus
been defined by a fractured methodology, one that accounts for only
half of the problem of identity politics at any given time. Only recently
have Italian studies scholars attempted to bridge the gap, a move best
exemplified by the recent volume of criticism Verso una storia di genere
 Introduction 11

della letteratura italiana, co-edited by Virginia Cox and Chiara Ferrari.17

In the editors’ introduction, Cox and Ferrari challenge the categoriza-
tion of women’s writing as separate from that of men, calling on schol-
ars to account for gender in all its aspects: language use, how texts are
circulated, how the relationship between the author and his/her read-
ership is construed, and how gender is constructed in different genres
of literature. Only then, when the issue of gender is viewed as a whole,
rather than as a male-female binary, will we be able to understand the
ways in which both men and women contributed to the formation of
a history of Italian literature. Courtney Quaintance has done just that
in her recent book on the Venetian dialect poetry of Domenico Venier’s
literary salon, where she examines their highly formalized (public) po-
etry against the pornographic and often violent dialect poetry circulat-
ed within their circle.18 For Quaintance, both public and private poems
work towards preserving both female virtues and male homosociality
and access to power. Writing Beloveds responds to Cox and Ferrari’s call
by providing a gendered history of Petrarchism that studies the differ-
ent ways in which male and female humanists engaged with Petrar­chan
rhetoric and tropes when forging new and unprecedented intellectual
relationships with each other. This puts us in a better position to under-
stand how Petrarchism is much more involved in the political and so-
cial world than has usually been seen. When used outside the confines
of the contemplative, lyric space, Petrarchism becomes a language of
mastery and power that mediates both gendered dialogues and identi-
ties in early modern Italy.
This study is split into two parts, between Petrarch and Latin human-
ist Petrarchism, and Bembo’s inauguration of vernacular Petrarchism.
The division is meant to distinguish between two distinct phases of
Petrarchan imitation, both steeped in very different cultural contexts
and enacted in different languages. The first part (chapters 1–3) pro-
vides a pre-history of Renaissance Petrarchism by concentrating on
Pe­trarch and his neo-Latin humanist imitators in the fifteenth century.
Chapter 1 focuses on the struggle between poetic and political agency
in Petrarch’s Latin works and in his vernacular lyrics, and the effect of
that struggle on the construction of the gendered identities that his later
imitators would recall. Petrarch’s grappling with these issues of agen-
cy culminates in what I term Petrarch’s “intellectual masculinity”: the
masculine intellect defined against powerless women and feminized
men. The ramifications of Petrarch’s gendered constructions inform the
remaining chapters of Writing Beloveds by revealing how this gendered
12 Introduction

hierarchy of power is drawn out from Petrarchan tropes and rhetoric by

his imitators in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
The construction of gendered identities in relation to power, includ-
ing the use of Petrarch’s poetic language to reify these gendered con-
structions, is the central issue of the second chapter’s analysis of the
earliest examples of humanist Petrarchism: the imitation of Petrarch’s
vernacular poetic tropes and language in neo-Latin humanist writing.
In letters addressed to Italy’s first generations of women writers, male
humanists translated Petrarchan amatory tropes from Italian into Latin
and adapted them to praise the female intellect. These adapted transla-
tions release the latent political issues of agency and power examined
in chapter 1. By recalling Petrarchan amatory tropes in their letters,
male humanists echo the paradigm emerging from the previous chap-
ter whereby the “masculine intellect” aligns learned men with power
while disempowering a feminine intellectuality. These earliest exam-
ples of humanist Petrarchism broaden both the chronological and the
contextual understanding of the later Renaissance poetic movement
and expose it as a social discourse that mediated gendered dialogues be-
tween intellectual men and women. Turning from the question of how
male humanists deployed Petrarchan rhetoric to both praise and limit
the political power of women’s writing, the third chapter examines
women’s responses to the general imitative practice. While the female
recipients of Petrarch-inspired letters never replied in like manner,
they did engage in a distinct form of humanist Petrarchism to establish
models of female sociality, political amicitia between women, and mari-
tal love. These women writers adopted Petrarchan rhetoric to mount
a complicated defence, accepting the praise but not the consequences.
They thus challenged social, moral, and religious expectations by over-
turning prescriptive ideals about women, extracting the political under-
tones of Petrarch’s poetry to carve out a space for women and women’s
issues in the male-dominated world of humanism.
The second part of the book moves from fifteenth-century humanist­
Petrarchism to its broader consequences for Renaissance humanism.
Where Part I focused on the gendered politics of Petrarch’s lyrics,
and its appropriation by both male and female neo-Latin humanists
in the fifteenth century, Part II looks ahead to the high Renaissance
of the sixteenth century and Pietro Bembo – the founder of the poet-
ic movement now known as Petrarchism. This book’s fourth chapter
turns to the epistolary exchange between Bembo and Gianfrancesco Pico
della Mirandola during the Ciceronian Quarrel – the most influential
 Introduction 13

example of the debate on neo-Latin language and imitation. Although

their debate is not explicitly concerned with gender, their theorizations
about Latin imitation focus on female mythology and nation building
and thus offer an idealized portrait of the political uses of educated
women and their place in humanist projects. This connection between
women, language, and nation building looks forward to Bembo’s liter-
ary friendships with female vernacular poets and his attempt to po-
litically unite the Italian peninsula under a common, Petrarch-inspired
vernacular language. The final chapter examines the two sides of Pietro
Bembo’s Petrarchism: the private poet-lover of his Petrarchist epistolary
exchanges with his lovers, and the public poet and founder of poetic
Petrarchism. His letters and poetry present a major historical innova-
tion: the two roles Petrarch kept separate – patron and beloved – are
now conflated in a single, female person. Bembo’s working out of the
patron-poet relationship, grounded in the question of agency, high-
lights that gender and politics are inherent to the Petrarchan aesthetic.
The afterword explores the broader socio-political and literary rami-
fications of a gendered history of Petrarchism, one that includes non-
poetic texts, private and public correspondence, and language treatises,
and that expands the chronology of the movement.
Taken together, the chapters in this study show a long tradition of
using Petrarchan rhetoric both to forge and negotiate an intellectual
relationship between men and women, and to establish a new linguis-
tic norm linked to political power and hegemony. The expansion of
Petrarchism to include humanist Petrarchism nuances and problema-
tizes our understanding of both gender politics in early modern Europe
and the expansive role of poetry in determining gendered identities.
The letters that opened this book pose a fundamental question about
the effect of lyric Petrarchism in the humanist period before proto-­
nationalism. Humanist Petrarchism shows how gender enters into poli-
tics through fundamental language use. The implementation of a new
linguistic norm rooted in Petrarch’s vernacular lyric poetry defines
female intellectuality against masculine identity in an unsettling way.
In the same way that Ciceronian Latin and its model of male amicitia
defined homosocial relations for centuries, humanist Petrarchism be-
came a social discourse that mediated gendered dialogues. The con-
tinuum between this early phenomenon of Latin Petrarchan imitations
and Bembo’s founding of the vernacular poetic movement places the
politics of gender at the heart of proto-nationalist discourse. The longer
history of Petrarchism is thus a gendered history. The poetic tropes that
14 Introduction

gave a voice to women in the publishing world of sixteenth-century

Italy were the same ones that men had used to render women’s voic-
es ineffectual in the previous century. The social uses of Petrarchism
would continue to influence not only the development of the courtly
love tradition in Italy but also the broader shape of early modern po-
etics for which it was vital. In the end, we gain a new understanding
of this crucial story in the formation of Renaissance poetics and poli-
tics, and a new measure of the reach of Petrarch’s influence on early
modern Italy.
PART I

Intellectual Masculinity and the Female

Intellect in Humanist Petrarchism
This page intentionally left blank
1 Women of Stone: Gender and Politics
in the Petrarchan World1

After the death of his brother Gherardo’s beloved, Petrarch sends him
a sonnet consoling him on his loss.2 What we expect is a poem in hom-
age to the deceased beloved and words of consolation for Gherardo’s
loss, yet what we encounter is something quite unexpected – a Dantean
discourse on patronage and agency:

La bella donna che cotanto amavi

subitamente s’è da noi partita,
et per quel ch’io ne speri al ciel salita,
sì furon gli atti suoi dolci soavi.

Tempo è da ricovrare ambo le chiavi

del tuo cor, ch’ella possedeva in vita,
et seguir lei per via dritta expedita:
peso terren non sia più che t’aggravi. (RVF 91, 1–8)3

The beautiful lady whom you so much loved has suddenly departed from
us and, I hope, has risen to Heaven, so sweet and gentle were her deeds. //
It is time to recover both the keys of your heart, which she possessed while
she lived, and to follow her by a straight and unimpeded road: let there be
no further earthly weight to hold you down.

The first quatrain describes the death of Gherardo’s beloved in a way

that recalls the figure of Petrarch’s own beloved, Laura: this pure soul
has now taken her place among the blessed.4 Yet the tone of the poem
changes in the second quatrain, where the discourse abruptly turns to
one of a political nature. Petrarch evokes Dante when he tells his brother:
18 Writing Beloveds

“Tempo è da ricovrare ambo le chiavi del tuo cor” (5–6). These are not
the words of a poet-lover lamenting the death of his beloved; rather,
they belong to Pier delle Vigne (ca 1190–1240), poet of the Scuola sicili-
ana, confidant of Frederick II, and suicide immortalized in Inferno XIII.
The episode Petrarch cites is the one in which the damned soul uses
periphrasis to present himself to Dante-pilgrim.5 Pier delle Vigne states,

Io son colui che tenni ambo le chiavi

del cor di Federigo e che le volsi,
serrando e diserrando, sì soavi

che del segreto suo quasi ogn’uom tolsi;

fede portai al glorïoso offizio,
tanto ch’i’ ne perde’ li sonni e’ polsi. (Inf. XIII.58–63)6

I am he who held both the keys to the heart of

Frederick and turned them, locking and unlocking, so gently

that I excluded almost everyone else from his

intimacy; I kept faith with my glorious office, so
much that because of it I lost sleep and vigor.

Pier delle Vigne does not have to tell Dante-pilgrim his name, for his
identity is known through the description of his political role in life: he
was the man who held the keys to the heart of Frederick II, the posses-
sion of which he claims gave him power over the most powerful ruling
monarch during the Duecento. Furthermore, Pier delle Vigne’s empha-
sis on fede in this passage – “cor di Federigo” (v. 59) and “fede portai al
glorïoso offizio” (v. 62) – attempts to recuperate his name by reiterating
the faith and loyalty with which he served both his patron and his of-
fice as chancellor and secretary. He leaves out the crucial details that
would explain his presence in the wood of the suicides – the accusation
that he betrayed the confidence of Frederick II, his subsequent impris-
onment, and his ultimate suicide – and instead focuses on his earlier
political identity. Ironically, although he claims to have controlled the
two keys to Frederick’s heart, if we follow the metaphor to its conclu-
sion, Frederick ultimately took back the keys to his heart, leading to Pier
delle Vigne’s demise.
Petrarch’s citation of this politically charged episode in his advice
to his brother carries with it a political dimension that raises the larger
 Women of Stone 19

issue of power and agency. Here, love is presented as a system of pa-

tronage starkly different from the courtly love model both Dante and
Petrarch had inherited: the Lady is stripped of her power over the lover
when Petrarch tells his brother to take back the power over his destiny,
as presumably Frederick II did in a political context. The emphasis on
fede that we find in the Dantean passage is missing in Petrarch’s advice
to Gherardo – the beloved is dead, as should be Gherardo’s fede and
loyalty to her. What is implied in Petrarch’s advice to his brother is
that the poet himself has retaken possession of the keys to his heart
and speaks from a place of wisdom, placing the poet in the position of
the patron (Frederick II), rather than the poet (Pier delle Vigne), in this
analogy. By likening the paradigm of love and desire to a system of pa-
tronage in such a manner, Petrarch reveals that both systems of power
could be controlled by the poet-lover – not the beloved or patron – if
the poet-lover were to take control away from them. Pier delle Vigne’s
lack of agency is a vivid and more recent reminder of the dangers of
patronage than the case of Seneca, for example, whose forced suicide
by Nero Petrarch laments and criticizes in Familiares 24.5. The figure
of Frederick II, then, presents an interesting dilemma for Petrarch. On
the one hand, Petrarch lauds him in Seniles 2.1 for having patronized
the first fathers of Italian literature.7 On the other hand, the king set in
motion the events leading to the suicide of one his poets, in a manner
too reminiscent of the relationship between Seneca and the tyrant Nero
for Petrarch to ignore. The intertwining of the poetic and the political
in Petrarch’s consolation poem to Gherardo presents a counter example
to the cases of Seneca and Nero. The poet is figured as more powerful
than the patron, and this new hierarchy of power is co-opted to love.
The struggle between poetic and political agency that we see in RVF
91 plays out in myriad ways throughout Petrarch’s vernacular poetry,
as well as his Latin works. He presents himself as a “rosigniuol” singing
under the shadow of the Colonna (RVF 10), a poet indebted to Robert
d’Anjou, a king not yet worthy of his own epic poem (Africa, dedica-
tion), and an ambassador for the Visconti who is not implicated in their
tyranny, despite what Boccaccio might think.8 Petrarch’s often com-
plicated relationship to his various patrons is well documented in his
works, and has been the subject of much criticism.9 What has not been
examined is the subject of this chapter: the effect of that struggle on the
construction of gendered identities and their relationship to power and
agency, which the poet’s humanist imitators will recall in their letters to
educated women in the following century.
20 Writing Beloveds

When, as in the poem to Gherardo, Petrarch strips the beloved and

the patron of the power they presumably hold over him, he creates an
analogy between powerless women and male patrons, essentially fem-
inizing the latter. This is emblematized in Petrarch’s figure of Laura-
Medusa in his vernacular poetry. By recovering the political origins of
the Medusa myth, where the gorgon’s disembodied head is used as a
weapon by Perseus against his political enemies, Petrarch creates a com-
plicated theory of poetic inspiration that reaches beyond the relationship
between poet-lover and Laura-Medusa to encompass the fraught para-
digm of power between poet and patron. By discursively harnessing the
petrifying gaze of Medusa, Petrarch aligns himself with Perseus after
the slaying, thereby denying his female beloved the petrifying agency
with which Medusa is normally associated. This connection between
femininity and impotence frames Petrarch’s writings about patronage.
Discursively feminized in his writing, Petrarch’s patrons are exposed as
being subject to the author’s pen. Using Medusa as a figure for the poet-
patron relationship not only stages the difficult relation between writing
and power, but does so through a significantly gendered frame. By com-
paring the Medusa myth through the figures of Laura in the lyric col-
lection and Sofonisba in the Latin epic Africa to the representation of his
patrons in both collections, we encounter the unwitting ramifications of
Petrarch’s gendered constructions of political agency. This comparison
pits what I term Petrarch’s “intellectual masculinity” against power-
less women and feminized men. As the remaining chapters of this book
show, this notion of Petrarchan intellectual masculinity will later be ap-
propriated by his male imitators in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

The Politics of Medusa’s Gaze and Petrarch’s

“Intellectual Masculinity”

In 1962, Kenelm Foster published one of the first and most often cited
articles on the figure of Medusa in Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmen-
ta, one which continues to influence scholarship on the subject.10 By in-
vestigating whether or not Petrarch’s Laura functioned as a Dantean
beatrice (conduit to God), or as a Medusa (obstacle to God), Foster ar-
gued for a binary opposition between the figures of Beatrice and Laura
that would have the former guide Dante towards the Beatific Vision
while the latter’s beauty competed with it and put Petrarch’s soul in
danger. For Foster, Laura-as-Medusa represents Petrarch’s moral arrest,
particularly in the three so-called Medusa poems11 wherein the beloved
 Women of Stone 21

is a “mere image of the lover-obsession, almost without moral over-

tones” (52–3). He reads these three poems as the obstacle that Petrarch
finally overcomes in the Hymn to Madonna at the end of the lyric col-
lection (RVF 366). In other words, Petrarch’s final turn towards the
Virgin, his proclamation “Medusa et l’error mio m’àn fatto un sasso”
(v. 111; “Medusa and my error have made me a stone”),12 signifies his
repentance and overcoming of Laura-Medusa, the final obstacle in his
salvation. In the end, for Foster, the figure of Laura-Medusa represents
the crux of a penitential theme that primarily characterizes the latter
half of the lyric collection, and that permeates the Secretum and Triumphi.
In the almost half a century since the publication of Foster’s article,
Italian scholarship has witnessed several theoretical approaches to the
figure of Medusa within Petrarch’s poetics, all of which ultimately come
back to the same penitential theme highlighted in 1962, and almost al-
ways in comparison to Dante’s beloved, Beatrice. From theological and
Dantean-inspired readings of the letter versus the spirit, to the psycho-
sexual approach in Freudian studies and feminist critiques of the silent
– yet menacing – beloved, scholars have tended to emphasize a singu-
lar episode involving the gorgon – her ability to turn men into stone
and deprive them of life, like the fallen warriors Perseus encounters in
her cave.13 The fixation on Medusa’s gaze and emphasis on its arresting
qualities have, in part, been due to our taking Petrarch’s fiction at face
value: when in RVF 129 Petrarch refers to himself as a “pietra morta in
pietra viva” (v. 51), he creates a pun on his name (Petra-, rock), applying
the Dantean maxim “nomina sunt consequentia rerum” (Vita nova XIII,
4) to create a (super)natural relationship between himself and Laura-
Medusa.14 We have generally linked the pun to its logical counterpart in
the figure of the beloved, since the notion that Petrarch’s name identi-
fies him as rock legitimizes his relationship to the beloved by present-
ing her as uniquely destined to be his beloved.15 Yet this brings up a
host of issues that are not easily resolved. If Petrarch’s name is al-
ready associated with rock, then it would seem that Laura-Medusa’s
petrifying powers would be at best redundant. What is his fear of be-
ing turned into stone when he is already a rock? In order to assess the
paradigm of power between Petrarch and Laura-Medusa, we must go
to Petrarch’s source for the Medusa myth, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and
consider closely how Petrarch adopts and deviates from it.
Critics have long privileged the encounter between Perseus and
Medusa as the primary source of Petrarch’s figure of Laura-Medusa,
overlooking details in his poems that would indicate otherwise. When,
22 Writing Beloveds

in poem 197, Petrarch claims that Laura’s eyes “ànno vertú di farne un
marmo” (v. 14; “have the power to turn it to marble”),16 he describes
a power that is only associated with Medusa after the slaying: while
alive, Medusa has the power to turn men into stone, but it is Medusa’s
disembodied head, in the hands of Perseus, that has the ability to turn
men into marble. The material difference between stone and marble
is perhaps less important than the way the semantic difference hints
at a change in Medusa’s power when it is appropriated by Perseus.
That is, if Medusa-as-Medusa turns men to stone, and later Medusa-as-
wielded-by-Perseus turns men to marble, then the difference between
stone and marble signals an alteration in Medusa’s power itself by
the fact of its appropriation. The implications thus lead us to an ex-
amination of Medusa’s agency, intact during life, and appropriated by
Perseus in death. A closer look at Petrarch’s Medusa poems reveals a
repetition of the detail concerning the beloved’s gaze and marble and
Petrarch’s understanding of the difference appropriation makes in
Ovid’s Medusa. Readers of Petrarch vis-à-vis Ovid rarely distinguish
between the scenes of Medusa’s power in the myth: the encounter be-
tween Perseus and Medusa in her cave, the Perseus and Atlas episode,
or the battle in Cepheus’s palace. They have all traditionally been in-
terpreted as different means towards the same end: petrification and
death. While acknowledging that Petrarch knew his Ovidian subtext
well, scholarship has not accounted for the multiple ways in which he
engages with the differences between the Medusa myths that are re-
counted over the course of the Metamorphoses. In other words, where
both Ovid and Petrarch see a multifaceted Medusa, we, as modern
scholars, have seen a one-dimensional character: a morally damning
figure, the idol in Foster’s “cult of Laura-laurel” that Petrarch ultimate-
ly rejects for a Christian salvation.
The distinction between Medusa’s agency in turning men to stone
and Perseus’s agency in using her head to turn men into marble is most
explicit in the description of Perseus’s political exploits in Cepheus’s
palace. There, Medusa’s disembodied head is used as a weapon to im-
mortalize Perseus’s opponents as cowards in the form of marble statues.
By turning his opponents into statues, Perseus creates dual-purpose
monuments: they are a warning to others who might challenge him
(from the Latin moneo, monere), and they are reminders of Perseus’s vic-
tories, visual markers of his self-aggrandizement. This second point
plays an important role in Petrarch’s poetics, not only in the Rerum vul-
garium fragmenta but also in the Latin Familiares. As shall be explored in
 Women of Stone 23

this section, attributing to Laura-Medusa the power to monumentalize

the poet in marble denies the beloved agency and power over the poet-
lover, since she becomes, like Medusa, a tool in the hands of the poet.
As Perseus did before him, Petrarch defeats Laura-Medusa and appro-
priates her agency in a move towards his own self-­aggrandizement. In
turn, she serves as a simultaneous source of spiritual doom for Petrarch
– as we also see in the Secretum – and a tool towards his own exaltation.
Particularly in the opening poems of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta,
the Petrarchan persona that emerges from vernacular poetry is one that
speaks with a distinctly different tone than the one encountered in the
Latin works. The authoritative ego of the Latin epistles and epic is virtu-
ally forgotten in the naive, wounded, fragile, and admittedly fragment-
ed io of the lyric.17 Much like Dante’s Beatrice in the Vita nova, Laura is
often presented throughout the poetic collection as haughty and cruel.
Yet her cruelty takes on many forms depending on her association with
mythological figures. As Daphne, her cruelty is in her refusal to return
love – a refusal for which she pays dearly when she is metamorphosed
into a tree.18 As the Medusa, she has the power to turn men into stone
with her gaze. Through her association with the gorgon, Laura appears
to wield and enact power over the poet-lover: she has power over his
fate. When the two myths are presented together, as in RVF 197, “L’aura
celeste che ’n quel verde lauro” (“The heavenly breeze that breathes in
that green laurel”), the power of Laura’s gaze becomes more powerful
in its comparison to the submissiveness of Daphne:19

L’aura celeste che ’n quel verde lauro

spira, ov’Amor ferì nel fianco Apollo,
et a me pose un dolce giogo al collo,
tal che mia libertà tardi restauro,

pò quello in me che nel gran vecchio mauro

Medusa quando in selce transformollo;
né posso dal bel nodo omai dar crollo,
là ’ve il sol perde, non pur l’ambra, o l’auro: (1–8)

The heavenly breeze that breathes in that green laurel, where Love smote
Apollo in the side and on my neck placed a sweet yoke so that I restore
my liberty only late, // has the power over me that Medusa had over the
old Moorish giant, when she turned him into flint; nor can I shake loose
that lovely knot by which the sun is surpassed, not to say amber or gold.20
24 Writing Beloveds

The series of Ovidian self-identifications in the quatrains presents a

conflicting portrait of the relationship between Petrarch and Laura. The
initial reference to Apollo in the first quatrain recalls the theme of unre-
quited love that has come to define the poetic collection as a whole. The
appropriation of the Daphne-Apollo myth is directly linked to the po-
etic process through the laurel and paronomastic play on the beloved’s
name: “l’aura” (wind/Laura) constantly “spira” (breathes/emanates
from) the “verde lauro” (green laurel). Laura, like Daphne, is figured as
a living, breathing laurel tree, but in this case, the power of the beloved
is analogous to a constant wind of poetic inspiration. In both readings
the beloved is deprived of agency. Although the poet suffers from un-
requited love, as does his Apollonian counterpart, he is not figured as
being harmed; rather, he is deified.
The transition to the second quatrain, however, recalls a second
Ovidian myth, which seemingly reverses the consequences that emerge
from the analogy to the Apollo-Daphne myth: as Medusa, Laura is
­given the power to petrify Petrarch and deprive him of life, as she did
to Atlas. The reference to the gorgon Medusa portrays Laura in a much
different light than did the veiled association with Daphne. Petrarch
aligns himself with Atlas, the strongest mortal turned to stone by
Medusa in Book 4 of the Metamorphoses:

viribus inferior (quis enim par esset Atlantis

viribus?) ‘at, quoniam parvi tibi gratia nostra est,
accipe munus!’ ait laevaque a parte Medusae
ipse retro versus squalentia protulit ora.
quantus erat, mons factus Atlas: nam barba comaeque
in silvas abeunt, iuga sunt umerique manusque,
quod caput ante fuit, summo est in monte cacumen,
ossa lapis fiunt (4.653–60)

At length, finding himself unequal in strength – for who would be a match

in strength for Atlas? – he [Perseus] said: “Well, since so small a favor
you will not grant to me, let me give you a boon”; and, himself turn-
ing his back, he held out from his left hand the ghastly Medusa-head.
Straightaway Atlas became a mountain huge as the giant had been; his
beard and hair were changed to trees, his shoulders and arms to spread-
ing ridges; what had been his head was now the mountain’s top, and his
bones were changed to stones.21
 Women of Stone 25

Petrarch apparently models his relationship with his beloved on

that between Atlas and Medusa: both Atlas and Petrarch are mortals
subject to the supernatural powers of mythic women. Thus, in recall-
ing this second myth, Petrarch bestows upon Laura the ability to con-
trol his fate and to transform him into something unrecognizable. Yet
the parallel is not quite as clear as it first appears. The Ovidian episode
Petrarch recalls in the second quatrain comes after Perseus has slain
Medusa, when the gorgon has lost her own agency. In fact, Atlas is the
first man to be turned to stone by the sight of the disembodied head
of Medusa in Book 4 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, when he refuses to offer
Perseus hospitality in his kingdom. In this episode, Medusa’s head is
used as a weapon by her slayer, whose physical strength is no match
for that of Atlas, a detail that significantly alters our understanding of
Petrarch’s appropriation of this Ovidian scene. At first, it would ap-
pear that Petrarch is aligning himself with Atlas, the one who is turned
to stone by Medusa. But when we recall that it is not Medusa herself
who petrifies Atlas, but rather Perseus bearing Medusa’s head, then it
would seem that the compliment is backhanded. For if Laura’s power
is like Medusa’s in this episode, then it is like that of her disembodied
head: powerful, certainly, but ultimately directed and appropriated
by another.
Petrarch’s Medusa is less a living, threatening, powerful female agent
and more a manipulated and severed head of a prior conquest. When
Petrarch returns to the Medusa myth in the tercets, he figures her in the
same terms that Ovid does after she is killed and her power appropri-
ated by Perseus. So when Petrarch rhapsodizes about Laura-Medusa’s
petrifying gaze, we should pause when we notice that it turns him to
marble rather than stone:

dico le chiome bionde, e ’l crespo laccio,

che sì soavemente lega et stringe
l’alma che d’umiltate e non d’altr’armo.

L’ombra sua sola fa ’l mio cor un ghiaccio,

et di bianca paura il viso tinge;
ma li occhi ànno vertù di farne un marmo. (9–14)

I mean the blond locks and the curling snare that so softly bind tight my
soul, which I arm with humility and nothing else. // Her very shadow turns
Exploring the Variety of Random
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Title: The fixer

Author: George O. Smith

Illustrator: Frank Kramer

Release date: June 2, 2022 [eBook #68223]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Street & Smith Publications,

Incorporated, 1945

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FIXER

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The Fixer
 By WESLEY LONG

Illustrated by Kramer

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Astounding Science-Fiction, May 1945.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Sandra Drake sat in her perfect apartment on Telfu, and cursed in an
unladylike manner. She was plying a needle with some difficulty, and
the results of her work were decidedly amateurish. But her clothing
was slowly going to pieces, and there was not a good tailor in nine
light-years of Sandra Drake.
The Telfan tailors didn't understand Solarian tailoring; Sandra was
forced to admit that they were good—for Telfans. But for Solarians,
they didn't come up to the accepted standards.
They had tried, she gave them credit for that. But the Telfan figure did
not match the Solarian, especially the four-breasted female Telfan
woman did not match Sandra's thin-waisted, high breasted figure. Her
total lack of the Telfan skin; part feathers, part hair, but actually
classifiable as neither, caused a different "hang" to the clothing.
Telfans wore practically nothing because of the pelt and though
Sandra's figure was one of those that should have been adorned in
practically nothing, Telfu was not sufficiently warm to go running
around in a sunsuit.
And making over Telfan clothing to fit her was out of the question.
She stood half a head above their tallest women, and the only
clothing that would have fit was clothing made in outsizes for
extremely huge Telfan women. Needless to say this size of garment
was shapeless.
Sandra finished her mending, tried on the garment and made a wry
face. "I used to curse the lack of humans here," she told her image in
the mirror, "but now I'm glad I'm the only one. I'd sure hate to have
any of my old friends see me looking like this."
The image that repeated silently was not too far a cry from the
Sandra Drake that had called the Haywire Queen in for a landing on
Telfu some months ago. But they hadn't waited, and she now knew
why. Well, she was forced to admit that her try at either trapping them
here or getting off with them had failed, and therefore she had been
outguessed.
That made her burn. Being outguessed by a man was something that
Sandra didn't care to have happen. She could live through it; but it
was the aftermath that really hurt. The Telfans came to understand
her too well after that incident. They no longer looked upon her as a
leading figure in her system. They knew that her knowledge of
Solarian science was sketchy and incomplete. Therefore she had lost
her hold upon Telfu, and was now forced to do her own mending.
On the other hand, Sandra Drake was an intelligent woman. Her
contempt for the Telfan language was gone. It went on that
memorable day when she discovered that everyone who understood
any Terran had gone to greet the landing Haywire Queen and had left
her unable to convey her desires. From that time on, Sandra plied
herself and was quite capable of conversing in Telfan, and fluently.
So Sandra Drake had been living with the Telfans for several months.
She had been forced to live with her wits and her mind and she found
it interesting. Telfans were quite cold to her charms, which made her
angry at times; on Terra she was used to admiration from anything
masculine from fourteen to ninety-eight. Below fourteen they didn't
know any better and over ninety-eight they didn't care, but the years
between were aware of Sandra Drake. On Telfu, posturing, posing,
and offering had no effect. They looked upon her as an encyclopedia;
an animate phonograph, which, upon proper stimulation, could be
made to sound interesting.
They had their machinery of action, too. Either Sandra assisted them
—or she did not find things easy. It was adjustable, too, and the
better assistance she gave, the better she found things.
Well, thought Sandra, it has been interesting—
She was startled by a knock upon her door. She admitted two Telfan
men and a Telfan woman. The woman she knew.
"Yes, Thuni?" she asked the woman.
"Sandrake," announced the woman, putting the Telfan pronunciation
on the Terran name, "These are Orfall and Theodi, both of whom are
among the leading medico-physicists of Telfu. They desire your help."
Sandra reflected quickly. After all, this ability to be of assistance did
give her a sop to her vanity. The fact that as little as she really knew
of Terran science she could assist, and at times direct, gave her first
feeling of real self-assurance.
"I shall, if I can," she told them.
"You, in spite of your untrained mind, have been extremely valuable,"
Orfall said simply. "While you do not know the details, you at least
have some knowledge of the channels of Terran science, and you
may, and have, explained down which channel lies truth, and along
which line of endeavor lies but a blank wall. That in itself is valuable."
"Another item of interest," said Theodi, "is the fact that the books left
us by the Haywire Queen are ponderous and often obscure; they
assume that we have a basic knowledge which we have not. You
have been able to direct us to the proper place in them to find the
proper answer to many of our questions."
"I see," said Sandra. All too seldom had anyone told her she was
valuable and interesting. It had been more likely a statement of her
headstrong nature, her utter uselessness, and her nuisance value.
"As you know, we of Telfu are slightly ahead of you in chemistry. Yet
there are things in chemistry that can not be solved without an
advanced knowledge in the gravitic spectrum that Terra has
exploited. Perhaps it was the lack of a channel in the gravitic that
drove us into higher chemical development; but we are planet-locked
until your people return to remove the block."
"Go on," said Sandra impatiently. "I gather that you are in trouble of
some sort?"
"We are, indeed. A plague of ... ah, there is no word for it in Terran"—
he switched to Telfan, "Andryorelitis," and back again to Terran
—"which is an air-borne disease of the virus type. No inoculation has
been discovered, and no immunity zone can be established. Telfu is
in danger of halving the population."
"Bad, huh?"
"It is terrible. It strikes unknown. Its incubation period is several days,
and then the victim gets the first symptoms. Nine days later, the
victim is dead. Unfortunately, the victim is a carrier of andryorelitis
during the incubation period, and therefore isolation is impossible."
"Sounds like real trouble to me," said Sandra. "Will examination
reveal it?"
"Of course," answered Orfall. "But what planet can examine the
population daily?"
"I see the impossibilities. Then what do you hope? We have nothing
that will combat it; knowing nothing of it in Sol would preclude any
possibility. What can we do?"
"To return to chemistry," said Theodi, "I will explain. Our chemico-
physicists have predicted the combination of a molecule which will
combat the virus selectively. It is a complex protein molecule of
unstable nature—so unstable, unfortunately, that it will not permit us
to compound it. We have used every catalyst in the book, and nothing
works. Follow?"
"I think so," said Sandra. "What keeps it from forming?"
"As I said, it is very unstable. The atomic lattice appears to be
structurally unsound. That happens in a lot of cases, you know. At
any rate, we can make this molecule—and have made it successfully.
But its yield is less than four ten-thousandths of one percent, and the
residue precipitates out in an insoluble compound that can not be
reprocessed."
"Otherwise you would keep the process going until completion?"
"Precisely. If reprocessing would work, we could leave the batch to
cook until all of it went into combination. Or we could add fresh 'mix'
to the processing batch and make the process continuous. But the
stuff is not re-processable. We must complete each batch, and then
go on a long process of fractionation to distill the proper compound
out of the useless residue."
"I can see that a process of that inefficiency would be bothersome,"
said Sandra.
"Not bothersome, Sandrake. Impossible. Imagine going into a project
giving about .000,37% yield for two hundred-fifty billion Telfans. The
required dose of the antibody is forty-seven milligrams. Call it fifty, for
round numbers, Sandrake, and you get a total figure of one trillion,
two hundred-fifty billion milligrams, or one million two hundred fifty
thousand kilograms. At four ten-thousandths of one percent yield,
we'd have to process something like three hundred billion kilograms
of raw material and then rectify it through that long and laborious
process of fractional crystallization, partial electrolysis, and fractional
distillation—with a final partial crystallization. Processing that much
raw material would be a lifetime job at best. Doing it under pressure,
with the planning and procurement problems intensified by the
certainty of the few short weeks we have ... ah, Sandrake, it is
impossible."
"What is this trouble specifically?"
"The final addition of silicon. It will not enter the compound, but forces
something less active from the combination."
"Making it useless?"
"Right."
"You've tried it?"
"And it works," nodded Orfall.
"And knowing that you of Terra have some wonders in science, we
would like to know—"
"You see," interrupted Orfall, "they've figured that the catalyst would
be less than sixty-one percent efficient, if we could combine the
silicon with it and let it replace into the other compound. That would
work. But again we are stuck. The catalyst is stable as it is. What has
Terra done to assist in forcing combination in unstable compounds?"
"Must be something," said Sandra, thoughtfully. "May I have a
moment to think?"
"Certainly."
"And one thing more. Haven't you anything that even resembles
tobacco on this sterile planet?"
"I'm afraid not," said Theodi. "Believe me, we have sought it."
"Thanks," said Sandra. "I know it was for me. But, fellows, I think
better with a cigarette."
"We have analyzed the one you gave us, and haven't found a similar
weed—"
"O.K., I'll do my thinking in a higher plane," smiled Sandra.

A thought, fleeting as the touch of a moth's wing, crossed Sandra's

mind. She fought to reclaim it. It had some association with an
experience—some experience in which she had failed, somewhere.
Recently? It might have been.
Long ago?
Sandra didn't think so.
She sat there silent, and the Telfans left with a short statement to the
effect that she might be able to think better alone. They would return
later.
It had to do with something highly scientific; something of a nature
that staggered her imagination. It was coupled with something vast,
something deep, something complex.
Her eyes fastened on a spot of brilliant light, reflected from a polished
and silvered glass vase at her bedside, and as she sat there with her
eyes unseeing, deep in concentrated thought, her mind focused upon
the one thing of vastness that she had been involved in.
Sandra's mind was good, in spite of her inferiority complex. It was
sharp, retentive, and above all, imaginative. It is a point for
speculation whether the imaginative qualities might not have been
responsible for her antics; certainly her escapades were the result of
some imaginative desire to excel. At any rate, she fastened her eyes
on the spot of light, and concentrated herself into a partial self-
hypnosis. The train of thought went on before her unseeing eyes with
the vividness of a color moving picture, and she was not living the
scene, but seeing herself live through a train of events that seemed to
jump the unimportant parts like a well-planned motion picture.
Her semihypnotized mind seemed to know the right track, though
Sandra's wide-awake mind either ignored the key to the problem or
was not certain of the right path to follow.
She was in a room of steel. Steel and machinery and gleaming silver
bars. There was some chaos there, too. The silver busbars had lost
their die-straightness, and in one place, a single lamination of the
main bus hung down askew. It was about a foot wide and one inch
thick, and the nine-foot section that hung from the ceiling was slightly
lower than the top of her head.
There was blood on the sharp corner, and Sandra looked down to
see the red splotch on the floor. She shuddered.
Cables ran in wriggly tangles across the floor. Some were still
smoking from some overload, and others, still new from their reels,
were obviously part of a jury-rigged circuit. Boxes of equipment were
broken open and their contents missing, though the spare parts in the
boxes were intact. The whole scene spelled—
Trouble!
The floor was not level; a slight tilt made standing difficult, until a man
from some other room shouted:
"The mechanograv is working—hold on!"
And the floor rotated until it was the usual, level platform. The huge
busbar swung gently on its loose mooring like a ponderous,
irresistible mass.
And there was a man who came striding in. His contempt for her still
hurt, and Sandra winced. Even in that motion-picture dreaming,
wherein the girl in the picture seemed apart from Sandra Drake, the
ire vented upon the red-headed image made Sandra writhe in
sympathy.
And then she heard the words come from the man's lips. They were
clear and concise, and seemed to come from the man himself instead
of from within her own memory:
"The electronic charge is great enough to force an inert element—
xenon—to accept an additional electron in its ring-system. This
permits combination with active elements such as bromine. When
xenon-bromide forms, we know that our intrinsic charge is highly
electro-negative. See?"

The scene within Sandra's mind dissolved, and she shook her head.
It cleared, but the words remained.
"Orfall," she called. "Theodi! Thuni—bring them here!"
They returned. "McBride," she said. "He can do it!"
"How?" asked Theodi skeptically.
"You've read their books," said Sandra Drake. "You know the principle
of the Plutonian Lens—and also that the alternating stations require
terrible electronic charges to maintain the lens that focuses Sol on
Pluto. They check that with the formation of xenon-bromide for
negative, and decomposition of tetrachloro dibromo-methane for the
positive charge. They can do it."
"Can't they do it on a planet?" asked Orfall sadly.
"Not unless they can raise the whole planet to a high negative
charge," snapped Sandra. "What do you think?"
"I don't know—none of us do. Can they?"
"No."
"Then—?"
"We'll call them, tell McBride what's the matter and what we need.
He'll fix it."
"It sounds like a fool's gesture to me," said Theodi.
"Utterly impossible. How are we going to get in touch with them in the
first place?"
"Look," said Theodi. "We can call them. See what McBride says and
put the problem to them. If there's a way out, fine. If not, we've lost
nothing."
"But how are we going to call them over nine light-years of space?"
"Ah—yes," said Theodi. "We can't."
"Maybe I can," said Sandra. "That'll be my contribution. I think I can
call them."
"Nine light-years—" objected Theodi.
"Remember that the gravitic spectrum propagates at the speed of
light raised to the 2.71828 ... th power. That'll make talking to Terra
like calling across the room. May I try?"
"You think they'll be listening for you?"
"Can't miss," said Sandra with a positive gesture. "My ship, the Lady
Luck, is equipped with the standard communications set. It puts out
right in the middle of the main communications band of the
electrogravitic. If I can get enough power to beam towards Sol, it'll hit
them right in the middle."
"You intend to use the set in the Lady Luck?"
"Overloaded to the utmost. They tell me that they'll take one hundred
percent overloads for an hour. Make that one thousand percent, and
it may last ten minutes. Ten minutes is all I need to give them our
trouble—they have recorders if McBride isn't there to hear it in
person."
"Where are you going to get that power?" asked Theodi.
"From you."
"Impossible, Sandrake. You know that there is not sufficient power
available to make such a program possible."
"Ridiculous. The resources of a planet are unmeasurable."
"Perhaps so," said Theodi. "But remember that our power, like Terra's
power, is spread out all over the face. The transmission of power
such as you will require would be impossible because the line losses
will be greater than the power input. It might be possible to connect
the networks together and draw the entire power output of Telfu into
one district, but line losses would prohibit its operation."
"I only need ten minutes maximum," said Sandra.
"You're asking us to sacrifice—? You mean—overload every plant
within efficiency-distance of your ship until it breaks down?"
"What have you to lose?"
"Can we do it?" asked Orfall.
"Of course," said Sandra. "You run your machinery at low load until it
is running at ten times the velocity, and then I cram on the power.
Momentum will carry me through."
"And if one machine goes, under that load, the entire district will go
completely dead."
"Oh no," said Sandra. "The closer and most powerful one will not be
used. That one will be used to talk to the boys when they arrive.
They'll only have a distress signal, and the details must be held until
they come investigating. They can't land, and so we'll have to tell 'em
the story while they're in space. We'll need that power."
"Small consolation. Then Indilee will be an oasis of power in a radius
of powerless country."
Sandra looked Theodi in the eye and said in a cold voice:
"Then go on out and die with the rest of your kind. What good will
your machinery do you if you're all dead?"
"This is a democracy, Sandrake. We cannot just take the machinery
and the equipment of others—even to save ourselves."
"How's your red tape factory?" she asked with a smile.
"Meaning?"
"Either you get those power plants or die. I don't care if you steal
them, buy them, or borrow them. But get them—and quick."
"But there is a chance to save Telfu," suggested Orfall.
"Sensible fellow," smiled Sandra. In her mind she cursed the whole
planet. This was a place for Sandra to undulate a bit; to turn on those
two-million kilovolt-ampere eyes; to stretch one rounded arm out
straight, putting the other hand below the ear and raising the elbow to
a level just above those eyes and shielding the victim from the
warmth in them. This showed off Sandra's svelte figure to perfection,
and few men in Sol could have refused Sandra anything after that
perfect performance.
But they were very few.
The Telfan ideal of beauty did not include Sandra Drake's perfection.
She could have postured from now until galaxy's end, and they
wouldn't have known her intent. Against their women, Sandra was
alien—not sickeningly ugly or deformed, but alien and acceptable—
and totally undesirable.
Sandra sighed, told the subconscious mind not to bother with the
spotlights and provocative sultriness, and tried to think her way to the
mastery of these Telfans.

"Couldn't we divert the electrical supply plants across Telfu?" objected

Theodi. "Seems to me—"
"Not a chance," said Sandra. "You have no idea of the power
required. I must shoot the works all at once. The set, the generators,
and the supply lines will all go out at once. That'll give me ten
minutes, I hope."
"But the dissipation of such power—Where can we collect it?"
"There's only one place on Telfu. That's in the power room of the
Lady Luck. That is still intact?"
"Yes. Handled, inspected, photographed, and manipulated without
driving power, of course, but it is still intact."
"Should be," commented Sandra wryly. "After all, my trouble was not
being able to make the drive work. Couldn't get any push. Used up
my entire stock of cupralum. So, do we?"
"I hate to say 'yes,'" said Theodi.
"Look," said Sandra, realizing something for the first time. "We have
lots of gravitic machinery. Give me your useless power plants and I'll
see that you get gravitic machinery to replace them."
"Um-m-m."
"Look, Theodi, you're used to thinking in Telfan terms—which means
no gravitics. Think in Terran terms. You are no longer alone in the
universe. You are in contact with a race that has gravitic power."
"Well—"
Sandra smiled. "Take it or leave it—and die," she told him. "Think of
it. Andryorelitis comes like a thief in the night, giving no warning. Like
the black wings of a gigantic, clutching bat, silent and ominous and
unseen it comes and spreads its horde of hell on the city. Men go on
in their way, meeting other men and inoculating them, passing the
germ of death to whomever the black visitor may have missed on his
visit. Men take it to their families and spread it from hand to hand,
from lip to lip, from mother to babe to grandparent and beyond. The
unborn is as cursed as the almost-dead, for it is within their bodies.
The days pass in which every soul is given the opportunity of
catching and spreading the dread disease.
"Then in this peaceful, unawareness of the terror, nine days pass and
one sees a red spot on his arm. He shies away from his friends not
knowing that they, too, have red blotches. The city is made of slinking
men, ashamed women, and scared children. The newspaper
headlines scream of the plague, but none will buy, for they fear
inoculation on the part of the newsboy. They fight and fear one
another, and the plague has its way, spreading across the city like the
falling of night and missing none.
"The Grim Reaper swings his sharp scythe, and the populace falls
like shorn wheat.
"And the stricken city becomes a place of horror. The smell of rotting
bodies taints the air and makes life impossible for those unlucky few
who have not been given the peace of death. None are interested in
the cries of the dying, and no one sees the sunken cheeks, the
withered bodies, the redding flesh. Do you like that picture, Theodi?"
"You speak harshly, Sandrake."
"You paint a prettier one," said Sandra, scorning him. "Go home and
dream. Let your imagination roam—or haven't you Telfans got
imagination?"
"We have, but—"
"You utter fool! To stand there like a stick of wood between Telfu and
some lumps of worthless metal! Like the drowning man that clutched
his gold—which pulled him under. Fool's gold. Theodi."
"There is much in what she says, Theodi," added Orfall.
"It is hard to think, sometimes," said Theodi slowly.
"Men!" sneered Sandra. "The whole sex is the same, here or on any
inhabited planet. You know so much! Your vaunted power of
reasoning is so brilliant. You pride yourselves on your inflexible wills
or your willingness to accept new ideas, depending upon which your
utter self-esteem thinks is best to exhibit at the instant. Thuni, what
do you think?"
"The metal is of little importance to dead men," said Thuni promptly.
"And you claim that Terra and Pluto have machines in abundance.
The answer is obvious."
"You see?" said Sandra triumphantly.
"I've forgotten," admitted Theodi. "I'd been taught from childhood that
high power was hard to get. It is hard to think that another star has it
a-plenty and is willing, and able, to give us enough for our needs. It is
a revolutionary thought and seems unreal. A story, perhaps. Yes,
Sandrake, you shall have your power."
"Good," said Sandra, taking a deep breath. "And thanks. I'll also need
your best students for the job."
"Our best are poor enough. Gravitics were known in theory only. A
detectable phenomenon, utterly useless. We could not pass the initial
doorway—the power generating bands—because of our satellite's
absorption of the primary effects. To study the higher and more
complex effects was impossible save in theory. But you shall have
them."
"I have some practical working knowledge of the stuff," said Sandra.
"One can't live and work with McBride and Hammond and the rest
without getting a bit of it. Oh, I was only with them for a few weeks at
best, but they are ardent teachers. I'll get along with the help of your
students."
"You're certain?"
"Not certain—but fairly sure. At best, you have nothing to lose and
everything to gain."
"I think we have misjudged you," said Theodi. "You're fundamentally
fine—"
"Thank you," said Sandra, simply. "Convincing you was the hardest
job I've ever done, believe me."
"Convincing the Terrans—?"
"Will be the second hardest job. Darn it, we can't use television."

McBride shook his head at Steve Hammond. "Don't believe it," he

said.
"You don't."
"No, I don't. Drake has something up her sleeve."
"It's a pretty big sleeve, then," grinned Hammond. "Rigging anything
to call from Telfu to Sol is no small potatoes."
"She overloaded everything in sight. That'd about make it right," said
McBride. "It went blooey right in the middle of the third sentence
—'McBride or Hammond: Telfu in grip of serious epidemic. Need
highly charged laboratory to prepare mis-valenced compound for
synthetic serum. Danger is imminent, so implore your help for the
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