“Tasso among the Muses: Reading and Writing Women in Early Modern Italy” is the first study to address the dynamics of reciprocity and collaboration between Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) and women writers, performers, and patrons. This dissertation situates Tasso’s literary and cultural activities with women within social and historical contexts, especially those informed by the disputes regarding women’s status of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, commonly known as the querelle des femmes. Among the lines of inquiry I pursue in this study is how the fiction of “Tasso, the errant madman” is a broadly popular literary-artistic construct, a product of the Romantic imagination that lionized the poet’s documented history of disquieting paranoia. While localized episodes from Tasso’s biography—including his seven years of detention in Ferrara for his public displays of defiance against the Este court—lend some credibility to this sorely isolating depiction of the poet, the story I tell attends to other considerations.

By studying Tasso through the lens of early modern sociability, this research raises awareness of the poet’s activities coordinating literary-intellectual networks. Emphasized herein is how Tasso’s socialized literary production—his nearly 4,000 letters and lyric poems sent to friends and potential patrons, dialogues with contemporary interlocutors, and epic poems about mobility and community building—reflects the cultural communities in which he participated. Essential collaborators in these settings are contemporary women writers, performers, and patrons, socially marginalized figures who shared in Tasso’s need to secure sponsorship from institutional authorities. In careful analysis of Tasso’s writings and women’s active reception of them, I demonstrate how the male poet’s sympathetic representation of fictional female characters yielded positive responses among historical female readers: professional singers and actresses designed performance programs based on the Gerusalemme liberata’s women, while female poets disseminated Tasso’s thematic and conceptual principles. The thesis this dissertation advances is that Tasso’s multifaceted connections with women shaped the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century expansion of cultural networks—literary, musical, theatrical, and scientific—in which opportunities for women and men to collaborate as intellectual protagonists increased due to developments in the notion of collective identity.

More broadly, this study underscores the collaborative networks within which early modern poets circulated, and situates questions of group identity at the forefront of the study of literary history. My findings reveal that the literary-intellectual exchanges between Tasso and women model multi-authored transmission, more than they indicate a linear process of reception. Tasso learned from women as much as women learned from Tasso. In different, though interconnected ways, each chapter challenges the dominant discourses of reception as a narrow form of imitation by shifting the critical focus from constructions of canonicity to modes of reciprocity. This attention complicates the conservative approaches to literary history that assert the dominant influence of one canonical (typically male) author. In this respect, the comparative work conducted herein avoids conveying any sense of hierarchy between Tasso’s constructed “canonical” voice and women’s marginalized “other” voices. This study further indicates how early modern women’s integration in poetic production—as makers and muses—complements the history of women’s one-sided efforts to “transcend their sex.” By offering new perspectives onto the relationship between literary and performance histories, this research brings into relief their interrelation as part of a broader, sociopolitical cultural history. Such emphases expand opportunities for critical investigation into ideas of collective authorship and audience, in both early modern and contemporary contexts.