Rereading Torquato Tasso's Heroines: Poetry, Subversion, and Forgeries

This dissertation analyzes the heroines in Torquato Tasso’s major poetic work, Gerusalemme liberata (1581), and their afterlife in the works of the early modern writer Lucrezia Marinella and in nineteeth-century Tasso forgeries. The central question is to understand Torquato Tasso’s position on the querelle des femmes. To address this question, this study conducts a close reading of Tasso’s heroines and examines other documents that shed light on Tasso’s relationships to women and on the reverberations of these relationships down the centuries. Specifically, I read Tasso’s three major heroines—Sofronia, Clorinda, and Erminia—as united by an uncanny connection that highlights a subplot of female empowerment within the larger narrative of the poem. I argue that Tasso’s characterization of Erminia establishes a new kind of literary warrior woman. I also analyze Tasso’s contribution to the Renaissance querelle des femmes with his Discorso della virtù feminile e donnesca and the ways Marinella responded to this treatise and to his characterization of the heroines of the Liberata, both in her 1600 Le nobiltà ed eccellenze delle donne, con i difetti e i mancamenti degli uomini and later in her own heroic epic titled L’Enrico ovvero Bisanzio acquistato. I argue that Marinella’s portrayal of gender subverts the figure of the warrior woman. Finally, I analyze how early biographers created myths about the poet’s life by reading Tasso’s heroines as representations of his alleged love affair with the princess Leonora d’Este. Forgers, moreover, profited from the lack of documentation of the details of the poet’s intimate life by filling in the gaps with counterfeit documents that perpetuated these myths. Two such forgeries, Giuseppe Compagnoni’s Le Veglie di Tasso and Mariano Alberti’s Manoscritti inediti di Torquato Tasso, had immense influence on the literary and artistic production of the nineteeth century that was concerned with Tasso’s life. Although Tasso’s three heroines are fictional representations, they were transformed by literature and history into important characters in the poet’s life