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  • Veronica Franco’s Gendered Strategies of Persuasion:Terze rime 1 and 2
  • Marilyn Migiel

How do we construct and understand language usage to be inflected along gender lines as “female” or “feminine” on one hand, and “male” or “masculine” on the other? Helping us to explore this question is a collection of poems by Veronica Franco (1546–1591), who made her living as an “honest courtesan” (“cortigiana onesta”) in sixteenth-century Venice and who maintained an active presence in Venetian cultural life. Franco’s Terze rime (1575) consist of twenty-five poems, some presented as Franco’s own, others presented as authored by a man, almost always an “unknown male author” (“incerto autore”). In the first half of the collection, poems appear in pairs: male-authored with a female response, or female-authored with a male response; only Franco’s poems appear in the second half of the collection.

In this essay, I examine the first male-female exchange of the collection in order to show how Veronica Franco distinguishes her own rhetoric (presumably gendered “female”) from that of a male interlocutor. Rather than focusing on questions of embodiedness, intellectual valor, and equality—questions that have been explored in the artistic endeavors dedicated to Veronica Franco and in much of the previous scholarship about her—I propose to explore Franco’s presentation of a strategy (implicitly defined as a female strategy) of managing aggression, responding to it, using it when necessary, and redirecting it.1 [End Page 58]

Before I begin my analysis, let me clarify how I think about the “unknown male author,” sometimes also referred to in the scholarship as the “anonymous poet.” It seems safe to say that most scholars assume that the poems by this unknown author are not by Franco. Some scholars, notably Margaret Rosenthal, the author of the most extensive monograph on Veronica Franco, see a single man, Marco Venier, behind the mask of the incerto autore;2 there exists also the view that multiple male authors are involved.3 I would note that it is conceivable that the poems attributed to an incerto autore could be by Veronica Franco’s own hand; in Ovid’s Heroides, of course, she would [End Page 59] have seen the example of a man writing in both female and male voices, and it seems tenable that she could have imagined her own poetic collection along these lines. For the purposes of my argument, however, determining the exact provenance of these poems by the unknown male author is not relevant. What is important for me is that Veronica Franco chose to put herself into dialogue with one or more male voices; that she determined that the male-authored poems should appear in a given order; and that, with a single exception (i.e., the edition in which Marco Venier appears as author of the first poem), she chose to mark the male-authored poems as by an unknown male author even though it would stand to reason that she could well have known who the male authors of these poems were.

Let us now turn to the opening poems of the collection. The male-authored “Se io vi amo al par de la mia propria vita” (“If I love you as much as my own life”) is followed by Franco’s response, “S’esser del vostro amor potessi certa” (“If I could be certain of your love”).4 Among scholars, there is a tacit understanding that this first malefemale exchange provides a template for understanding how Franco positions herself with respect to male interlocutors. The man’s poem stands, ostensibly, as his declaration of love; we hear about the man’s suffering in love, his faithfulness, Veronica Franco’s cruelty, the pity she should show him, and his longing for her. In her response, Franco argues the difference between potentially misleading appearances and true love, which reveals itself in deeds and not just words; she expresses regret both because he feels pain and because he impedes her desire to respond to true love; emphasizing the importance of virtuous deeds, she tells him the conditions under which she will return his love; she ends by reaffirming that she longs...

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