Desiring Subjects: Mimetic Desire and Female Invidia in Gaspara Stampa’s Rime^*

This chapter argues that Luigi Carrer’s fascination with the fictive exchange between the two women poets Gaspara and Mirtilla was not his own romantic invention, but was at least shared by the eighteenth-century compiler of Stampa’s oeuvre, Luisa Bergalli. Bergalli’s first inclusion in Stampa’s Rime of a sonnet attributed to Mirtilla but actually written by Giusto De Conti contributed to the creation of the myth by presenting a correspondence between two women, staged as a poetic exchange. Andreini’s emphasis on being able to interpret many parts, and cross gender boundaries, is staged in the opening sonnet of her Rime, and seems to function as a poetic manifesto which one think is the key to all of Isabella Andreini’s production. The lover is resurrected into the beloved almost in a perfect paraphrase of Ficino’s description of mutual love, previously cited. The trope of Stampa as Sappho was deployed most heavily in the 1738 edition.