Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
The sixteenth-century writer Ortensio Lando (ca. 1512–ca. 1553) wrote many of his works pseudonymously and borrowed liberally from the works of others. Part of a community of professional writers who experimented with collaborative modes of literary production, Lando was also deeply invested in the currents of religious reform that swept through sixteenth-century Italy. In his extensive literary recourse to female personas, Lando privileged contemporary women who shared his own heterodox religious views. This essay examines Lando's female impersonations with particular attention to his use of Lucrezia Gonzaga da Gazzuolo (ca. 1521–76), whose complex literary relationship with Lando is illustrated by her presence throughout his literary corpus, and by his role in the book of Lettere published under her name. It argues that the relationship between these two figures can be best understood as a literary and spiritual partnership, one that meshed Lando's editorial expertise with Gonzaga's fame as a woman of extraordinary virtue and spiritual authority, a reputation that Lando himself helped to create. In an era when print publication by women was still far from common, such collaboration constituted an alternative path to literary expression.
Research for this article was supported by grants from several institutions. Initial funding from the Fulbright Foundation and the American Association of University Women in 1999–2000 facilitated my hunt for Lucrezia Gonzaga's manuscript letters in the state archives of Florence, Venice, Modena, and Mantua and at the Vatican Library. I am grateful to the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Delaware for a research leave in 2007 that allowed me to continue working on Lando and Gonzaga, and to the University of Pennsylvania Rare Book and Manuscript Library for granting me access to its holdings in early modern Italian letterbooks. For their insightful suggestions, many thanks to Scott Johnson and Elissa Weaver, as well as to Diana Robin, Carol Pal, and my fellow presenters at the Rethinking Early Modern Women panel at the 2008 meeting of The Renaissance Society of America. I am also grateful to the anonymous readers at Renaissance Quarterly for their valuable comments on this article.