Papers by Adriana Romero
Female Friendship: Literary and Artistic Expressions, 2022
In the Orlando furioso (1532) and Gerusalemme liberata (1581), tales of women’s friendship primar... more In the Orlando furioso (1532) and Gerusalemme liberata (1581), tales of women’s friendship primarily serve to catalyze the poems’ overarching love narratives rather than celebrate the power of bonds shared among women. However, in the Scanderbeide (1623)—the first historical narrative poem written by a woman during the Italian Renaissance—Margherita Sarrocchi (1560–1617) portrays the close friendship shared between two female warriors as an ideal bond that positively affects the women involved. In doing so, Sarrocchi revises the poems of her male predecessors through a proto-feminist depiction of female friendship, illustrating that female bonds form outside of women’s relationships to men and are not full of strife or envy as the portrayals of her forerunners suggest. By comparatively analyzing such relationships in the Furioso, Liberata, and Scanderbeide, this essay examines heroic female friendship, a topic that has received scant attention in scholarship. I argue that Sarrocchi’s revisionary portrayal shows that she was not only updating the genre of heroic poetry, but was also contributing to wider cultural discussions of friendship, a popular topic in the Renaissance that more commonly focused on the male experience.
Italica, 2019
Female friendship has long been a popular theme in modern Italian literature, one that became esp... more Female friendship has long been a popular theme in modern Italian literature, one that became especially prominent during the 1970s when women's bonds became a catalyst for female liberation and emancipation. However, representations of women's friendships have changed since then, with portrayals that are more complex and nuanced than had been previously seen. This article showcases how Elisabetta Rasy and Elena Ferrante expand on Adriana Cavarero's theory of amicizia narrativa or narrative friendship to accommodate their own ideas about friendship among women. While Cavarero argues that amicizia narrativa is predicated upon the act of listening to a friend's story and then narrating it back to her to allow for the friend's self-validation, Rasy and Ferrante demonstrate how the friend's story is instead used for the narrator's own benefit. Using Cavarero's theory as a critical framework, this article offers a comparative reading of Rasy's and Ferrante's portrayals of female friendship in their respective works, Posillipo and the Neapolitan novels, to argue how these two contemporary authors illustrate the complications that may arise in women's friendships such as ambivalence and competition.
Thesis Chapters by Adriana Romero
This dissertation is a comparative study of literary texts authored by sixteenth-century Italian ... more This dissertation is a comparative study of literary texts authored by sixteenth-century Italian women that treat female friendship across the genres of epistolary writing, lyric poetry, and heroic poetry. The primary works under consideration include the correspondence between Elisabetta Gonzaga (1471–1526) and Isabella d’Este (1474–1539), the lyric poems authored by women in Lodovico Domenichi’s anthology Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime et virtuosissime donne (1559), and Margherita Sarrocchi’s heroic poem the Scanderbeide (1623). In addition to the long-standing classical and Christian notions of friendship that held strong in Renaissance Italy, the genres of epistolary writing, lyric poetry, and heroic poetry each had a distinct and mostly male literary tradition of friendship. The literary works in this study reveal the various ways early modern Italian women contributed to their respective genres, and moreover, to larger cultural discourses on friendship by inserting the female perspective and experience. Their writings not only illuminate their understandings and interpretations of female bonds but also demonstrate their use of writing to initiate and maintain friendships with other women.
Chapter 1 looks at women’s epistolary prose through the correspondence between two princesses who were sisters-in-law, Elisabetta Gonzaga, the duchess of Urbino, and Isabella d’Este, marchesa of Mantua. Focusing primarily on letters exchanged during the beginning years of their friendship, I show how the two noblewomen relied on letter writing to express and reciprocate sentiments of intimacy. Chapter 2 on the Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime et virtuosissime donne, the first all-female lyric anthology edited by Lodovico Domenichi, analyzes the friendship poems—sonnet exchanges between women to celebrate and form literary friendships and single-authored lyric that depict women’s bonds—present in the collection. Looking at these two types of lyric in tandem, I argue that Petrarchism authorized women’s expressions and representations of female friendship. Chapter 3 focuses on the heroic poem of Margherita Sarrocchi (1560–1617). Drawing from her classical and Renaissance predecessors who in their heroic poems depict and highlight friendships between male warriors, Sarrocchi revises the tradition by portraying and celebrating the bond that develops between two of the poem’s female protagonists, Rosmonda and Silveria.
While much has been explored with respect to male friendship in Italian Renaissance literature, the topic of female friendship has remained mostly untouched. With this study, I therefore address this need to uncover women’s discourses on friendship by providing alternative perspectives and new insights on a subject that was traditionally understood in male terms.
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Papers by Adriana Romero
Thesis Chapters by Adriana Romero
Chapter 1 looks at women’s epistolary prose through the correspondence between two princesses who were sisters-in-law, Elisabetta Gonzaga, the duchess of Urbino, and Isabella d’Este, marchesa of Mantua. Focusing primarily on letters exchanged during the beginning years of their friendship, I show how the two noblewomen relied on letter writing to express and reciprocate sentiments of intimacy. Chapter 2 on the Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime et virtuosissime donne, the first all-female lyric anthology edited by Lodovico Domenichi, analyzes the friendship poems—sonnet exchanges between women to celebrate and form literary friendships and single-authored lyric that depict women’s bonds—present in the collection. Looking at these two types of lyric in tandem, I argue that Petrarchism authorized women’s expressions and representations of female friendship. Chapter 3 focuses on the heroic poem of Margherita Sarrocchi (1560–1617). Drawing from her classical and Renaissance predecessors who in their heroic poems depict and highlight friendships between male warriors, Sarrocchi revises the tradition by portraying and celebrating the bond that develops between two of the poem’s female protagonists, Rosmonda and Silveria.
While much has been explored with respect to male friendship in Italian Renaissance literature, the topic of female friendship has remained mostly untouched. With this study, I therefore address this need to uncover women’s discourses on friendship by providing alternative perspectives and new insights on a subject that was traditionally understood in male terms.
Chapter 1 looks at women’s epistolary prose through the correspondence between two princesses who were sisters-in-law, Elisabetta Gonzaga, the duchess of Urbino, and Isabella d’Este, marchesa of Mantua. Focusing primarily on letters exchanged during the beginning years of their friendship, I show how the two noblewomen relied on letter writing to express and reciprocate sentiments of intimacy. Chapter 2 on the Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime et virtuosissime donne, the first all-female lyric anthology edited by Lodovico Domenichi, analyzes the friendship poems—sonnet exchanges between women to celebrate and form literary friendships and single-authored lyric that depict women’s bonds—present in the collection. Looking at these two types of lyric in tandem, I argue that Petrarchism authorized women’s expressions and representations of female friendship. Chapter 3 focuses on the heroic poem of Margherita Sarrocchi (1560–1617). Drawing from her classical and Renaissance predecessors who in their heroic poems depict and highlight friendships between male warriors, Sarrocchi revises the tradition by portraying and celebrating the bond that develops between two of the poem’s female protagonists, Rosmonda and Silveria.
While much has been explored with respect to male friendship in Italian Renaissance literature, the topic of female friendship has remained mostly untouched. With this study, I therefore address this need to uncover women’s discourses on friendship by providing alternative perspectives and new insights on a subject that was traditionally understood in male terms.