Epithalamium Interruptum : Maddalena Campigliais New Arcadia

Sola Fenice nova forma io prendo¹

A woman living outside the bond of marriage or without the companionship 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 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 imprimatur 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 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...