1. Introduction

The prolific sixteenth-century writer Ortensio Lando consistently tested the literary borders of genre, gender, and authorship. Lando composed treatises and letters, books of paradox and spiritual meditations, many of which were published pseudonymously — often under women's names — and borrowed liberally from other works, including his own. A writer whose entire literary corpus would be placed on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1544, Lando had good reason to disguise the authorship of his works. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, the elusive nature of Lando's authorial persona and the views he expressed can be attributed in large part to his involvement in the heterodox religious culture of mid-sixteenth-century Italy.Footnote ¹ Yet his consistent recourse to assumed personas, particularly female ones, raises interesting questions about the literary construction of gender and the interactions between men and women in the literary and religious culture of sixteenth-century Italy. Lando was part of a community of professional writers that included Nicolò Franco (1515–70), Pietro Aretino (1492–1556), Lodovico Dolce (1508–68), and Ludovico Domenichi (1515–64) — the so-called poligrafi described by Paul GrendlerFootnote ² — who experimented with different genres and strived to produce texts that would appeal to a growing commercial market for vernacular works. As Diana Robin has recently shown, these poligrafi worked increasingly closely with women writers, helping to bring their works to press and benefiting from their patronage.Footnote ³ Lando, however, is unique in his persistent and elaborate use of the voices and images of real women as frames and façades for his texts and as vehicles for the discourse within them. This masquerade resulted not only in accolades for Lando's skillful literary impersonations but also in public fame and recognition for the women who inspired them. Lando played a fundamental role in what we may call the manufacture of female cultural reputation; in turn, the acquiescence and, in some instances, the active collaboration of these female muses conferred complexity and prestige on his literary projects and benefited his own literary reputation. In both regards, the masquerade served a deeper purpose beyond the commercial one, subtly articulating and circulating heterodox views among an audience of the initiated. Lando's female impersonations can therefore help us to think about modes of both textual and spiritual collaboration in sixteenth-century Italy in new ways.

The most extensive example of such a case is Lando's partnership with Lucrezia Gonzaga da Gazzuolo, a noblewoman from a minor branch of the ruling family whose complex relationship with Lando is illustrated by her prominence throughout his literary corpus and by his presence in her single published work. Gonzaga first appears as the author and recipient of a handful of letters in an anthology put together by Lando in 1548, the Lettere di molte valorose donne (Letters of Many Valorous Women), and again in his Consolatorie (Letters of Consolation) of 1550. She then assumes a much greater role as Lando's interlocutor and student in a religious dialogue published by him in 1552, the Dialogo . . . nel quale si ragiona della consolatione & utilità che si gusta leggendo le Sacre Scritture (Dialogue . . . on the Consolation and Usefulness Enjoyed upon Reading the Holy Scriptures) and as the subject of his admiration in his Due panegirici (Two Panegyrics) of the same year. Her literary presence culminates in a book of letters published under her name, also in 1552. This work, the Lettere della signora Lucretia Gonzaga . . . a gloria del sesso feminile . . . in luce poste (Letters of the Lady Lucrezia Gonzaga . . . Published for the Glory of the Female Sex), cemented Gonzaga's public image as a woman both learned and virtuous, detailing her girlhood studies in Latin and Greek under the tutelage of the writer Matteo Bandello, her early marriage to a notorious condottiere later arrested for trying to murder the Duke of Ferrara, and her dutiful efforts on her husband's behalf despite his crimes. Although Gonzaga's contemporaries admired her literary talents, some recent scholarship has suggested that her letterbook was the work of Lando: his most outrageous and elaborate work of epistolary impersonation yet, eclipsing even his anthology of Lettere di molte valorose donne.Footnote ⁴ Indeed, the little modern attention to Gonzaga has focused almost entirely on this problem of attribution, privileging the role of Lando in the volume while dismissing that of Gonzaga.

While Lando's influence may be present in this work at an editorial level, however, such wholesale attribution of Gonzaga's letters to Lando overreaches for a number of reasons, including archival evidence of Gonzaga's activity as a letter-writer and contemporary recognition of her as an accomplished author. Perhaps more importantly, such an approach fails to address the complex and bidirectional nature of the literary interaction between Lando and Gonzaga, and the issues of gender and literary impersonation that arise from it. Regardless of whether or to what extent Gonzaga penned the letters published in her letterbook, it is clear from their repeated literary invocations of one another that Lando and Gonzaga had a long and mutually beneficial association. Each influenced and profited the other throughout this association: Lando by using Gonzaga's name and persona both to authorize and enliven his works, Gonzaga by the celebrity and fame she gained through Lando's repeated invocations of her virtue. Not only did their collaboration bring increased literary recognition to them both, but it also reflects deeper connections that bound the two together. Like Lando, Gonzaga was immersed in the heterodox religious currents that swept through much of Italy in the mid-sixteenth century, sharing many of the convictions held by the Italian spirituali regarding justification by faith alone (sola fides), the privileging of the Gospels, and a deemphasis of the sacraments.Footnote ⁵ Indeed, Gonzaga would be prosecuted toward the end of her life by the Inquisition of Mantua, questioned on an article of faith that had once brought Lando to the attention of Church authorities in Venice.Footnote ⁶ Not only did Lando and Gonzaga's partnership advance the literary stature of both over a period of several years, but it also served as a means to circulate religious views that would become increasingly controversial with the passage of the decades.

This essay examines the problem of Lando's female impersonation as a literary strategy in the years leading up to the publication of Gonzaga's Lettere. Why did Lando repeatedly assume female guises throughout his career, and what did he hope to gain from writing in the female voice that he could not otherwise accomplish?Footnote ⁷ Are Lando's female impersonations most accurately characterized as appropriations of the female voice, or do they result from a more complex dynamic? This essay also investigates Lando's use of the persona of Lucrezia Gonzaga throughout his works, and his role — which became progressively more complex during the four-year period of their association — in contributing to the creation of this persona. Although critics often mention Gonzaga in relation to Lando, little serious study has been made of her or of their association.Footnote ⁸ By examining their shared literary history leading up to 1552, however, we may open a window on a new kind of literary and cultural relationship, one based on collaboration and cooperation. Ultimately, we can more usefully understand the Gonzaga letterbook as the product of a partnership, one that meshed Lando's editorial expertise and knowledge of the literary market with the literary potential and exemplary reputation of Gonzaga, in the process joining two like minds in a common goal, that of spreading their evangelistic views. In an era when print publication of women was still much less common than that of men, such collaboration constituted an alternative path to literary and spiritual expression than the conventional one of single authorship.Footnote ⁹

2. Lando's Female Ventriloquism

The earliest major example of Lando writing as a woman is the spiritual treatise Della vera tranquillità dell'animo (On the True Peace of the Spirit, 1544), which bears the name not of Lucrezia Gonzaga but of Isabella Sforza (1503–61), an illegitimate daughter of a branch of the powerful Milanese family. Scholars have attributed this work to Lando on the basis of similarities to Lando's other works as well as contemporary evidence supporting his authorship; Sforza's role as a partner in the volume's conception and production is unknown.Footnote ¹⁰ What little biographical information exists regarding Isabella Sforza suggests that she was known, at least for a time, to espouse the spiritualist and quietistic views attributed to her in this treatise.Footnote ¹¹ As the title suggests, the Vera tranquillità dell'animo celebrates faith as an internal experience — a kind of personal illumination — and as a serenity that derives from the certainty of salvation: as Francine Daenens explains, “an inner peace . . . with a clear connotation of reformist dogma.”Footnote ¹² Lando, whose belief in justification by faith alone and in the direct and exclusive reading of holy scripture is reflected in many of his works,Footnote ¹³ may have been Sforza's spiritual guide, although in the treatise's dedicatoria he acknowledges her superiority; and this text, as Daenens has shown, contributed in a major way to solidifying Sforza's fame on the basis of her religious views.Footnote ¹⁴ Although the Vera tranquillità quietly echoed the fundamental tenet — that mankind is justified by faith alone — of the very popular, and even more controversial, Beneficio di Cristo (banned in 1549), in 1544 similar views could still be expressed prudently with some liberty, and Daenens argues that Lando's use of Sforza as a persona had more to do with his wish to benefit from her family and political connections than with an effort to hide behind her identity as a purely protective mechanism.Footnote ¹⁵

While Lando may well have been seeking Sforza's social and political prestige, spiritual partnerships between men and women were not uncommon among the heterodox circles of this period. As Robin's study illustrates, proponents of the spirituali movement — of which Sforza's text bears the influence — exchanged ideas with one another against the backdrop of vibrant salons throughout Italy, such as those presided over by Giulia Gonzaga (1513–66) and Juan de Valdés (1509[?]–41) in Naples and by Vittoria Colonna (1490[?]–1547) and Costanza d'Avalos (1460–1541) in Ischia.Footnote ¹⁶ Like men, women were deeply involved in the dissemination of new religious doctrine. The exchanges between Juan de Valdés and Giulia Gonzaga; between Vittoria Colonna, Bernardino Ochino (1487–1564), and Cardinal Reginald Pole (1500–58); and between other members of similar partnerships played an important role in the circulation of heterodox and Reformist thought, leading in many cases to literary production in support of it.Footnote ¹⁷ Abigail Brundin speculates, for example, that Colonna's acquaintance with Ochino, whom she followed throughout Italy to hear preach, inspired the famed poet's innovative form of spiritual petrarchismo: “[Ochino's] influence could well have led Colonna to consider the poetic potential of evangelism and, vice versa, the enormous evangelizing potential of poetry.”Footnote ¹⁸ More broadly, Constance Furey notes that educated and talented laywomen such as Colonna held a special authority among spirituali circles, where they were seen as fusing humanist ideals about learning with a nonintellectual, feminized spirituality.Footnote ¹⁹ From this position, women such as Colonna, Isabella Sforza, and Lucrezia Gonzaga could participate in intellectual culture without transgressing gender norms, using their status as promoters of Reformist ideas to authorize their appearance in the literary sphere.Footnote ²⁰

There is no doubt that the Vera tranquillità, with its exhortations to profound inner peace, its privileging of scripture, and its spirit of compromise over radical reform, rests on a spiritual foundation that linked Lando and Sforza through their shared beliefs. Lando's female impersonation, however, must also be seen within the cultural context of the querelle des femmes and the defense-of-women texts to which this debate gave rise throughout the mid-sixteenth century. Nearly all of Lando's works are marked to some degree by the cultural polemics over women, and the Vera tranquillità is no exception. The work's dedicatory letter, signed “il Tranquillo” with one of Lando's pseudonyms, explains that, although he had been working on a similar religious treatise himself, intended for Paolino Manfredi of Lucca (a hotbed of heterodoxy), he found Isabella's far superior to his own and decided to publish it instead.Footnote ²¹ Through this pretext, Lando highlights Sforza's literary achievement (as well as her increased spiritual authority) with regard to his own: the female student has overtaken the male teacher. (Several years later, in his Dialogo on scripture, Lando relocated himself in the position of authority, with Lucrezia Gonzaga as his pupil.) The Vera tranquillità functions both as a religious treatise — an advocation of complete detachment from the joys and trials of the world — and as a celebration of the female author's extraordinary moral and religious virtue and literary ability. The exaltation of women's intellectual and moral qualities was at the heart of a wide range of literary works in the early modern period, from Juan Luis Vives's influential De institutione feminae christianae (The Education of a Christian Woman, 1524) to later works such as Lucrezia Marinella's Della nobiltà et eccellenza delle donne (On the Nobility and Excellence of Women, 1600) and Moderata Fonte's Il merito delle donne (The Worth of Women, 1600).

Whether or not such discussions were rhetorical, or, rather, reflected the progressive social views of their authors, they brought women's experience and the obstacles they faced to the forefront of literary debate, as Albert J. Rabil, Jr., points out in his edition of one such fundamental contribution, Henricus Cornelius Agrippa's Declamatio de nobilitate et praecellentiae foeminei sexus (Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex, 1529).Footnote ²² They contributed to a renewed interest in literary discussions of all aspects of female experience, as the sheer number of texts that touch on the topic — including medical manuals, domestic handbooks, and books of secrets — attests.Footnote ²³ While these texts, which proliferated throughout the sixteenth century, spoke both to an increasing interest in women's experience and an expanding public of women readers, few were actually written by women, who still faced greater obstacles to print publication than did men.Footnote ²⁴ Thus writers and publishers faced a kind of editorial paradox: the market for women's texts was there, but the authorship was not. Lando's choice of a female persona in the Vera tranquillità, then, stemmed not only from an effort to seek access to Isabella's patronage and social and political connections, as well as to circulate heterodox religious views, but also from a desire to capitalize on a growing demand for texts concerned with women, an interest fueled by, but certainly not limited to, the humanist context of the querelle des femmes. As evidenced by the variety of his publications, Lando was an astute assessor of literary trends, trying his hand at a range of genres with market appeal. In mid-sixteenth-century Italy female authorship, real or assumed, added interest and the aura of authenticity to works relating to the woman question and increased their appeal. The debate over women thus became an integral part of Lando's literary production beginning with the Vera tranquillità in 1544 as Lando — whether motivated by the demands of the literary market, the desire to test his own rhetorical skill, or a genuine defense of women — began adopting women's voices to frame his discussions of literature, religion, and culture.

Subsequent to his portrayal of Isabella Sforza, Lando did not abandon her, but rather made her a protagonist in his next experiment with the female voice, the Lettere di molte valorose donne of 1548, an epistolary anthology that is worth examining here in some detail. A text that defies easy categorization and analysis, the Valorose donne has often been dismissed as an oddity, a minor project thrown together by Lando in response to market demand for women's letters.Footnote ²⁵ Here some 250 letters on subjects ranging from marriage and childbirth to religion and literature, including several attributed to Sforza and to Lucrezia Gonzaga, constitute a stunningly complex impersonation of gender on Lando's part, one that has never received the attention it deserves.Footnote ²⁶ The only anthology of the period to consist entirely of letters exchanged between women, Lando's epistolary experiment participates in two concurrent literary trends: the interest in texts relating to women's experience described above, and the new vogue for vernacular letter collections that began with Pietro Aretino in 1538 and continued well into the next century.Footnote ²⁷ While the vast majority of epistolary texts published in this period were authored by men and not by women, letter-writing was commonly theorized as a feminine genre, one that required the feminine qualities of sentiment and spontaneity rather than the masculine qualities of reason and art: literary models of female epistolarity from Ovid's Heroides to Boccaccio's Fiammetta fueled this characterization.Footnote ²⁸ As a consequence there was great interest in, and admiration for, examples of female epistolarity in sixteenth-century Italy — if not a wide supply of such texts.Footnote ²⁹ Lando's anthology thus capitalized on an interest in women's experience and, more specifically, in women as writers of letters, that was coupled with the conviction that men, with proper instruction, could convincingly learn to write like women.Footnote ³⁰ Like the Vera tranquillità, the Valorose donne proposes to showcase and publish the real writing of women: here, the letters have been “collected from a variety of places and written by wise women.”Footnote ³¹ Even more explictly than the Vera tranquillità, the Valorose donne stakes a position within the ongoing querelle des femmes, claiming in the dedicatory letter that the purpose of the collection is to show the range of female erudition and defend women against their detractors, “so that wicked tongues, enemies of women's honor, stunned, might cease to bite and wound women, indeed . . . that they might now learn to respect and honor this most noble sex.”Footnote ³² Although a number of the letters do focus on the praise of women, it is difficult to discern any dominant point of view in the collection, for, in typical Landian fashion, one letter's argument is frequently contested by another.Footnote ³³ A deeper reading reveals the anthology's inconsistencies with regard to a defense of women, indicating that it was composed as a rhetorical experiment in querelle des femmes discourse.

This was not the first time that Lando had purported to present the voices of a group of women, as opposed to the single female voice of the Vera tranquillità: his Paradossi (1543) attributes part of its content to women, and his later Consolatorie and Ragionamenti familiari (both 1550) do the same. However, the Valorose donne is a particularly elaborate case of female impersonation, mixing letters attributed to women who really existed with those of other women who were almost certainly invented by Lando. Although published anonymously, the anthology was widely recognized as Lando's work by contemporaries such as Anton Francesco Doni (1513–74), who in his Libraria of 1550 listed it under Lando's name;Footnote ³⁴ this attribution has been accepted by most critics over the centuries who agree that the overall stylistic uniformity of the volume attests to Lando's hand in its production.Footnote ³⁵ Moreover, the content of the letters — which in addition to discussions of women's issues such as marriage and childbearing includes evaluations of various professions, recipes for miraculous remedies, stern letters of consolation, and stories of bizarre deaths — points to Lando's presence, echoing themes addressed in his other works. For example, many of the arguments taken up in the Valorose donne's numerous moral letters, such as the perils of avarice, lust, and women's unrestrained speech, reappear in other Landian texts, such as the Ragionamenti familiari, while the unsentimental letters of consolation contained in the Valorose donne echo sentiments expressed in the Paradossi and the Consolatorie. Footnote ³⁶ Finally, the frequent use of the paradox, juxtaposing letters arguing for and against a particular position, and of the dubbio, which employs long lists of rhetorical questions, further suggests Lando's presence, recalling structural techniques he employs elsewhere.Footnote ³⁷

In addition to the rhetorical similarities between the Valorose donne and Lando's other works, the anthology also shares cultural concerns often expressed by Lando. The Valorose donne is not only an exercise in assuming the female voice, but a vehicle for broader cultural critique.Footnote ³⁸ For example, the letters' constant recourse to long lists of classical and modern exempla, particularly in discussions both for and against women's literary aptitude and activity, fits neatly into the querelle context, but the long lists of women worthies furnished there also serve another purpose. Gleaned, often verbatim, from the Officina, a humanist repertory Lando freely plunders in a number of his other works, such rote recitation functions as a critique of the humanist culture Lando had come to find empty, inferior to the one true source of knowledge, scripture.Footnote ³⁹ Silvana Seidel Menchi and Sabina Pezzini have shown that some of the letters in the anthology derive from other sources as well, including works by Erasmus and Equicola, reflecting Lando's practice — not uncommon in the early modern period — of copying and translating other works in his own.Footnote ⁴⁰ In this sense, Lando's assumption of female personas in the Valorose donne merely adds another dimension to an intertextual literary practice to which terms like authentic and original are ill-applied.

If these psuedo-erudite letters are the product of Lando's intertextual practice, which is linked in turn to his critical stance toward humanist learning, they are also connected to a subtext of spiritualismo similar to that found in the Vera tranquillità. As is often remarked, epistolary texts reveal important information through the networks of correspondents they address. Many of the learned female protagonists of the Valorose donne, including Isabella Sforza and Giulia Gonzaga, are deliberately chosen, as Daenens has noted, for their relevance to the heterodox sensibility the letters convey beneath the façade of the querelle des femmes.Footnote ⁴¹ For example, the very first letter in the collection, an exchange between Isabella Sforza and Bona Sforza, Queen of Poland, suggests that the anthology may be read as a covert exposition of certain views shared by reform-minded Italians. Reminding Bona that she is now a role model for all women, Isabella advises: “It will behoove you, my lady, prudently to dissimulate many things, and to know everything.”Footnote ⁴² According to Daenens, the verb dissimulare stands as a Nicodemitic sign of the text's hidden core of religious dissent, a reminder that one's outer appearance need not correspond to one's true beliefs — an attitude adopted by many among Italy's heterodox circles during the first half of the sixteenth century.Footnote ⁴³ Heterodoxy is without question an important element in the Valorose donne, most frequently in letters regarding scripture, which presage later discussion by Lando and Lucrezia Gonzaga in Lando's Dialogo on scripture.Footnote ⁴⁴ As we see in both texts, scripture, for Lando, freed of the complications and distortions of interpretation, commentary, and allegory, stands at the base of religion.Footnote ⁴⁵

For example, a letter attributed to Giovanna Cavalleria in the Valorose donne praises scripture over all other forms of writing: in true Landian fashion, Giovanna resorts to extensive lists to make her point, arguing that having read widely herself, she regrets it. She fervently asserts her devotion to scripture, the only true book: “Ever since I came to know the holy Cross, I have wished never to have read anything but the divine scripture; I wish I had consumed this holy book as God commanded through the prophet; I wish I had turned it into nectar and blood because it would have been as a lantern at my feet.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Similarly, Francesca Ruvissa urges a simple, straightforward approach to scripture as the true path to God: “if you treat the holy scripture with humility, not ambition (as many do these days), you will have the Holy Spirit for your teacher.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Isabella Sforza herself commends Fulvia Colonna for having begun to study scripture, and encourages her not to be overwhelmed by commentators who distort and corrupt it; elsewhere she complains to Isabetta Castigliona that priests stray too far from scripture in their sermons: “these preachers of ours seem to me not preachers and ministers of the word of God, but performers; it would certainly seem to me less of a sin to go to see the Circean or Nemean games, if they still existed, than to listen to these charlatans who recount their dreams with cabbalistic fictions, and ignore the holy mysteries of scripture.”Footnote ⁴⁸ In contrast, a letter from Apollonia Rovella to Leonora da Vertema praises a priest who interprets scripture faithfully: “He is not puffed up, nor pompous, he doesn't spout sesquipedalian words, he doesn't claim to be a prophet, he is sparing with allegory knowing that it is not an effective means for teaching the dogma of the faith.”Footnote ⁴⁹

For Lando, the misuse of religion verges on superstition, and superstition in all forms is anathema to him.Footnote ⁵⁰ Lando's opinions are certainly provocative: it is perhaps to the credit of the elaborate disguise he enacts in the Valorose donne that they have passed largely unnoticed over the centuries.Footnote ⁵¹ Lando's emphasis on scripture thus combines a heterodox sensibility with a more general manifestation of his rejection of humanist learning to launch a pointed social and cultural critique: if the Bible represents the true source of all learning, then humanist erudition, as well as biblical commentary, is unnecessary.Footnote ⁵² At the same time, however, other groups of letters in the Valorose donne that deal with quotidian aspects of early modern women's lives such as pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation — as well as education and erudition — are set firmly against the backdrop of the woman question, seemingly in response to the many male-authored efforts to codify female experience that circulated in early modern Italy, from humanist texts like Matteo Palmieri's 1439 La vita civile (which took up the problem of breastfeeding) to the libri di segreti, or books of secrets, that provided tips for healthy pregnancy and childbirth.Footnote ⁵³ Clearly there was an audience for such discussions, but most of the authors dealing with them spoke only from the male perspective. If the male voice had traditionally conferred authority on literary texts, in the case of the Valorose donne it is the many voices of female experience that purport to add authenticity. Lando grants the reader a seemingly intimate glimpse into the private world of women, a female network in which advice and comfort are shared.Footnote ⁵⁴

The complex gender impersonation of the Valorose donne, then, is simultaneously pro- and contra-woman, both an endorsement and a condemnation of female intellect and virtue. Female gender is the costume Lando assumes to grant increased authenticity to the cultural critique he makes, allowing him to reach a wider audience curious about the female perspective on issues familiar from male-authored texts. His female personas also draw power and legitimacy from the real involvement of sixteenth-century Italian women such as Isabella Sforza and others, including Giulia Gonzaga, in the promotion and circulation of new religious doctrine. The question for the reader, of course, is whether the actual sex of Lando's text matters. Can a male author presume to represent female discourse, or is this necessarily an act of appropriation?

3. Lando and Gonzaga

In her discussion of Lando's impersonation of Isabella Sforza, Daenens, using a term employed by Gérard Genette, suggests we characterize the Vera tranquillità as an apocryphe consenti (that is, published with permission), with Sforza the garant du texte (textual guarantor): surely the impersonation was so extensive that Isabella must have been a party to it and the text must have had the authority of her assent.Footnote ⁵⁵ As we consider Lando's literary interactions with Lucrezia Gonzaga, I suggest we keep in mind this useful characterization. Could Lando have appropriated so thoroughly Gonzaga's name and public image without her consent and participation? And if Gonzaga did play an active role in Lando's literary construction of her persona, what would this suggest about modes of early modern textual production, not to mention literary and spiritual partnerships?

The relationship between Lando and Gonzaga can be seen most clearly in a trilogy of works dating to 1552, beginning with two that appeared under Lando's name or pseudonym, the Panegirici and the Dialogo . . . nel quale si ragiona della consolatione & utilità che si gusta leggendo le Sacre Scritture, and culminating in Gonzaga's Lettere, which, like the Valorose donne, positions itself as a volley in the querelle des femmes, published “for the glory of women.” Printed within a month of one another, the Dialogo on scripture and the Panegirici constituted two elements in a campaign by Lando — and, I suggest, by Gonzaga herself — to lay the groundwork for a third, and far more extensive, representation, the letter collection bearing her name that was published later in the same year.Footnote ⁵⁶ As noted above, the vernacular lettera familiare was by 1552 at the height of its success in Italy, and there was a great demand for women's letters, which were considered to possess the prized qualities of sincerity and spontaneity. Simultaneously, the literature engendered by querelle des femmes polemics was in full flower, with writers arguing for and against women's virtues and capacities and seeking to define their various roles, as Lando himself had done in the Valorose donne. It is against this literary and cultural backdrop that the partnership of Lando and Gonzaga must be seen, as together they first created, and then capitalized on, Gonzaga's fame and exemplary reputation. The Panegirici and the Dialogo established Gonzaga as a literary, moral, and spiritual model, one who espoused many of Lando's own beliefs. The Lettere profited from the reputation created by these two works, offering an authoritative first-person view of this exemplary female experience, based on the real events of Gonzaga's life. In keeping with what was increasingly becoming the purpose of the vernacular letterbook, the Lettere now proposed Gonzaga as a model — here, of female epistolarity and feminine virtue — for readers to imitate.

Before turning to these three works, however, it will be useful to review what is known about the historical Gonzaga, who was celebrated in her day by literary figures such as Girolamo Ruscelli, Giulio Cesare Scaligero, and Matteo Bandello for her virtue, intellect, and wifely fidelity.Footnote ⁵⁷ Much of the information we have about Gonzaga's life derives from Lando's Panegirici, which divides its praise between Gonzaga and Maria de Cardona, the Marchioness of Padulla (known, like Gonzaga, for her devotion to scripture); and from the Lettere themselves. Archival sources and contemporary chronicles confirm most of the facts that underlie these literary portraits.

Born near Mantua around 1521, Gonzaga was taken in by her uncle, Luigi Gonzaga of Castelgoffredo (or Castel Giuffrè), after the deaths of her parents in 1529.Footnote ⁵⁸ There she was educated by Bandello himself, who taught her Latin and Greek during his sojourn at the court of Castelgoffredo as secretary to Cesare Fregoso, Luigi's brother-in-law.Footnote ⁵⁹ When she was about fourteen, arrangements were made for Gonzaga to marry Giampaolo “Fortebraccio” Manfrone (d. 1552), a condottiere for the Venetian Republic.Footnote ⁶⁰ Manfrone was known for his violent temper: his murder of a servant while lodged in the house of Gonzaga's relatives in Mantua resulted in his exile from that city, while the scandalous story of Manfrone's attempt on the life of Duke Ercole II d'Este of Ferrara and his subsequent imprisonment would later become well known throughout Northern Italy — Filippo Rodi's Annuali di Ferrara, for example, recounts how Manfrone, enraged over the duke's designs on his widowed sister, attempted first to poison and later to ambush him.Footnote ⁶¹ When Manfrone was eventually arrested for the attempted murder of the duke, and led back to Ferrara handcuffed and bound, even the Venetian Republic, which had long employed him, declined to come to his aid.Footnote ⁶² However, in spite of her husband's deplorable conduct, Gonzaga sought to help him. A 1552 composition by Bartolommeo Ricci recounts her tearful intervention on behalf of her husband, and suggests that it was she who persuaded the duke to commute Manfrone's sentence from death to life in prison.Footnote ⁶³ According to Gonzaga's Lettere, she tirelessly petitioned everyone, from minor officials to the king of France and the duke himself, on Manfrone's behalf. It was this unhappy union that provided the basis for contemporary accounts of Gonzaga's virtue and devotion.

Less is known of Gonzaga's life following her husband's death in a Ferrarese prison in 1552.Footnote ⁶⁴ We know from Manfrone's will that her dowry was returned to her, although her husband left her nothing else.Footnote ⁶⁵ Not long after Manfrone's death, Gonzaga was sent, probably under the authority of her cousin Vespasiano Gonzaga, to a convent in Bozzolo, where she remained for at least three years.Footnote ⁶⁶ By the mid-1560s she was back in Mantua, having seen at least one of her two daughters married. Caught up in the undercurrents of religious dissent that swept through Mantua in the late sixteenth century, Gonzaga appeared on the periphery of several Inquisition trials, and in June 1567 was herself tried on suspicion of heresy.Footnote ⁶⁷ However, because of her social status and family connections, arrangements were made for the trial and her subsequent abjuration to be conducted quickly and in secrecy.Footnote ⁶⁸ Two months later, in a letter to her sister Isabella, Gonzaga expresses amazement and dismay that she could have come under suspicion.Footnote ⁶⁹ Yet Gonzaga's Lettere do touch upon sensitive religious themes, particularly with regard to scripture and references to the Lutheran tenet of justification by faith. Gonzaga died in Mantua in 1576, twenty-four years after the publication of her only book and nine years after her Inquisition trial.

Gonzaga spent much of her married life alone with her children and servants in her husband's palazzo in the small village of Fratta Polesine in the Veneto region. According to Lando's account of these years in the Panegirici, she lived there “in total solitude, enclosed almost perpetually in a squalid tower.”Footnote ⁷⁰ In Lando's account, Gonzaga becomes a kind of fairy-tale princess, her essential goodness unblemished by the wretched conditions of her life and her unremitting solitude. In reality, though, Fratta lay on the route from Mantua to Venice, and Gonzaga often had visitors on their way from one city to the next.Footnote ⁷¹ In this way she was able to establish contact with important figures from the Venetian literary world, including the editors Dolce and Domenichi; the writer Luigi Groto, called the “Cieco d'Adria” (1541–85); and, of course, Lando himself. By the early 1550s, an informal cenacolo had sprung up around Gonzaga's palazzo in Fratta, organized, according to Stefania Malavasi, by Giovan Maria Bonardo (d. 1584) and Gonzaga herself.Footnote ⁷² Although Gonzaga was not an official member of the Accademia dei pastori frateggiani, she was certainly an integral part of this loosely knit society that also included Ruscelli, Parabosco, and Orazio Toscanella.Footnote ⁷³ Lando was not a member of the Pastori, but he, too, participated in the group's meetings.Footnote ⁷⁴

These contacts were important for Gonzaga's literary formation: according to the Lettere, she read their works avidly and often requested their latest publications. Her relationship with these literary figures was central to her own positioning as a literary and cultural figure as well, for just as she singles out and praises the Pastori in her Lettere, so they applaud her by dedicating many of their works to her. It is likely, moreover, that the Pastori — wishing, perhaps, to lend support to the participation of women in culture — played a role, along with Lando, in encouraging the publication of the Lettere. Certainly the publication of Bonardo's Rime in honor of Gonzaga in 1565 and his Madrigali (which contain a dedication by Toscanella to Gonzaga) in 1571 would seem to indicate that Gonzaga retained the support of her old literary circle long after the Pastori frattegiani had ceased to gather at her Fratta residence. It is also likely that it was during this same period, in which Gonzaga's contact with writers from all over Northern Italy was at its most intense, that she encountered the religious debates and discussions that flourished in Italy in the years before the Counter-Reformation reached the peak of its repressive influence. As her letters — not to mention her later Inquisition trial — reflect, Gonzaga was influenced by many aspects of evangelist and Reform thought, and was almost certainly introduced to some of the views she espouses in the Lettere by members of the Pastori frattegiani. Groto, for example, had previously been involved with the Accademia degli Addormentati in Rovigo, which was forced to disband under suspicion of heresy.Footnote ⁷⁵ Dolce and Domenichi both had heterodox sympathies and were associated with Andrea Arrivabene, a printer who in 1549 was warned by the Holy Office against selling heretical books.Footnote ⁷⁶ Lando expressed heterodox views in the Valorose donne and other works. The print diffusion of heterodox ideas in the mid-sixteenth century was vast, and affected the entire peninsula.Footnote ⁷⁷ Like many other men and women, Gonzaga was exposed to these ideas and incorporated some of them into her own religious beliefs and writing.Footnote ⁷⁸

Gonzaga first appears in Lando's work as the author and recipient of two letters in his 1548 anthology, the Lettere di molte valorose donne, and again in his Consolatorie of 1550; Lando's Cataloghi of 1552 are also studded with admiring references to her.Footnote ⁷⁹ In these appearances, she is but one member of a large cast of female characters, along with others like Isabella Sforza, Alda Torella, and her own sister Isabella of Puvino, adopted by Lando to play a role in his foray into querelle des femmes polemics. As Lando's ventures into female impersonation became more elaborate, however, Gonzaga assumed an even greater role, as evidenced by a trilogy of texts all published in 1552. She appears as Lando's interlocutor and student in the Dialogo . . . nel quale si ragiona della consolatione & utilità che si gusta leggendo le sacre scritture, one of the few works published, despite its heterodox content, under Lando's own name. She appears again as the subject of admiration in the Panegirici published shortly thereafter. Her literary presence culminated, however, in the book of letters published under her own name, also in 1552, the Lettere della signora Lucretia Gonzaga . . . a gloria del sesso feminile . . . in luce poste. Gonzaga's contemporaries accepted the letterbook as hers, although some scholars have since suggested that it was in fact the work of Lando. Doni, for example, lists Gonzaga as the author of the epistolario in his Libraria (while attributing the Valorose donne to Lando); Groto mentions Gonzaga's Lettere in a list of epistolary collections that includes works by Gerolamo Parabosco, Bernardo Tasso, and Claudio Tolomei.Footnote ⁸⁰ Many of the contributors to Bonardo's Rime refer admiringly to Gonzaga's literary talents, even describing her as a new Vittoria Colonna, implicitly suggesting a link to Colonna's own epistolary activity as the author of a 1544 volume of spiritual letters, as well as to Colonna's poetic production.Footnote ⁸¹ Later, Pierre Bayle's encylopedic Dictionnaire historique et critique attributes the Lettere to Gonzaga, praising them effusively.Footnote ⁸² Even Apostolo Zeno, one of the first to suggest that Lando composed the Lettere, admitted he had no evidence to this effect: “I have found no other writer who declares these Letters to be the work of Gonzaga's friend.”Footnote ⁸³

The attribution to Lando stems from the close relationship between the two, documented by Gonzaga's frequent presence in Lando's works and by Lando's appearance in her Lettere, thirty-four of which are addressed to him. Together with Lando's prior appropriation of women's epistolary voices in the Valorose donne, the literary association of Lando and Gonzaga has caused critics to turn to him instinctively as Gonzaga's ghostwriter, her letters thereby constituting the climax of a long process of appropriation on Lando's part. Some assertions of Lando's authorship have been fueled by critical bias. Ireneo Sanesi, for example, who has given the most attention to the problem of authorship, argues that stylistic similarities between the Valorose donne and the Lettere constitute proof of their common authorship, seemingly ignoring that Gonzaga's letters are almost entirely lacking in the exempla and detti that characterize many of Lando's works and the Valorose donne in particular — diverging, that is, from what Seidel Menchi has termed the “stylistic homogeneity” of Lando's corpus.Footnote ⁸⁴ At the same time, however, Sanesi accepts close stylistic correspondences between the Valorose donne and a male-authored text, Pietro Lauro's Lettere (1552), as a valid example of direct literary imitation.Footnote ⁸⁵ Sanesi further claims the “contradictory” nature of Gonzaga's Lettere as proof of their inauthenticity, citing Gonzaga's characterizations of her imprisoned husband (which vary dramatically depending on her audience) and a pair of letters concerning Lando's Panegirici. In one of these, Gonzaga thanks Lando, while in the second she professes ignorance of the book's author.Footnote ⁸⁶ According to Sanesi, these “numerous contradictions” were “inexplicable if we maintain [the letters] were written by Gonzaga, utterly reasonable if we instead acknowledge Lando as their author.”Footnote ⁸⁷ This explanation ignores the dynamic, evolving nature of epistolary exchange, which when captured in a printed epistolario can, and usually does, reflect changes in knowledge or point of view over time — not to mention the varying demands raised by the expectations of the internal reader to whom a letter is directed.Footnote ⁸⁸ By describing Manfrone differently to different readers, Gonzaga could expect to elicit various reactions. Her letters regarding the Panegirici show a natural progression from an earlier state of ignorance to a later one of knowledge, suggesting that the letters were written at different times.Footnote ⁸⁹ Rather than indicate a Landian element of epistolary paradox, the contradictions noted by Sanesi are in fact integral to both real and verisimilar epistolary exchange.

Finally, although many of Gonzaga's letters were prompted by historical events, such as the arrest and imprisonment of Manfrone, Sanesi is unwilling to accept that Gonzaga might have written about her own life. He argues, rather, that Lando, as Gonzaga's contemporary and friend, was equally acquainted with general current events and with Gonzaga's own family drama, and therefore similarly qualified to compose fictional letters about these subjects.Footnote ⁹⁰ Yet the archival evidence I have located, in the form of thirteen manuscript letters by Gonzaga, shows that she was in fact a writer of letters, that she wrote letters to some of the same people she addresses in her epistolario, and that she lobbied for the commutation of Manfrone's sentence.Footnote ⁹¹ For example, letters exchanged between Gonzaga and her husband (and preserved today in the Archivio di Stato di Modena) are proof that the epistolary relationship so central to the structure of Gonzaga's epistolario did in fact exist. The surviving letters from Gonzaga to Manfrone are dated 1546 and 1548, while his to her cover the entire period of his incarceration, from his arrest in 1546 to his death in 1552. Much like her published letters to Manfrone, Gonzaga's brief, to-the-point manuscript missives urge the prisoner to put his faith in God and bear his lot patiently. In a letter dated Venice, 22 November 1546, for example, she writes, “From messer Marcello's letter, you will understand the reason for my coming to Venice, as well as what was accomplished and what one hopes to accomplish for the welfare and honor of Your Lordship. I won't explain further. I will say only this: that you must be of good spirit, and look after yourself and be well, for the lord God will see to everything, and it will be — soon — time for good to come to us once more.”Footnote ⁹² Taking a similar tone, a letter to Manfrone published in Gonzaga's epistolario states, “Messer Leonardo Raymondo brought me a letter from you. . . . To be sure, it would be beyond my imagination and hopes to think that any good might come to us, were it not that one must never despair of God's grace.”Footnote ⁹³ Suggesting that Gonzaga did attempt to garner support for Manfrone's case as indicated throughout the Lettere, the manuscript letter of 22 November 1546 (quoted above), as well as another dated 13 April 1548, both refer to journeys undertaken by Gonzaga on his behalf.Footnote ⁹⁴

Manfrone's own manuscript letters contain pleas for just the sort of help his wife offers in the Lettere. In one case, for example, he begs her to “placate” the Duke of Ferrara.Footnote ⁹⁵ The published epistolario contains a number of letters seeking Manfrone's release, including two letters to Ercole II d'Este, just as Manfrone requests in his missive from prison. Moreover — although it is a request for the duke's intervention in a land dispute that arose as a result of Manfrone's absence rather than a direct request for Manfrone's release — the one manuscript letter we possess from Gonzaga to Ercole d'Este demonstrates that she was accustomed to approaching the duke for help.Footnote ⁹⁶ Manfrone's repeated requests that his wife write to him in prison — in one letter he pleads, “send me . . . at least a few lines, regularly, apprising me as to your welfare, for the love of God”Footnote ⁹⁷ — suggest that it would have been likely, even necessary, that Gonzaga correspond regularly with her imprisoned spouse, just as she appears to do in the Lettere. Finally, other manuscript letters at the Biblioteca Estense and the Archivio di Stato di Mantua document the years following Manfrone's death and the publication of the Lettere, including the period spent in a convent in Bozzolo and, later, the Inquisition trial, underscoring Gonzaga's habitual recourse to letter-writing in documenting the events of her life. This is not to argue that Gonzaga's published letters were pieces of genuine correspondence reproduced for publication. On the contrary, many were composed expressly for publication or at least revised before going to print, as was most often the case with sixteenth-century epistolari. But there is ample evidence that Gonzaga was a capable and prolific writer of letters in her own right, one who had access to the creative and rhetorical tools necessary to produce an epistolario based on (but not the same as) her real correspondence with many of the same people who appear in her published letters: her husband Manfrone, her sister Isabella and her family, members of the Pastori frattegiani, and the Duke of Ferrara.

Moreover, textual evidence of Lando's intervention in Gonzaga's text is ambiguous, calling into question issues of textual practice and literary imitation that were widespread in sixteenth-century culture. Various forms of literary collaboration were common in Gonzaga's time: writers enlisted one another to edit or revise their work before publication, and the widespread practice of riscrittura, a form of literary “plagiary,” created complex intertextual links between writers.Footnote ⁹⁸ Such practices tend to conflict with modern ideas about individual authorship. Yet a scenario of collaboration and intertextuality could account for certain overlaps between Gonzaga's Lettere and Lando's works — the same kinds of overlaps that exist between Lando's work and the letters of Pietro Lauro, for example, without calling the latter's authorial status into question.Footnote ⁹⁹ A similar problem arises with respect to Dieter Steland's recent discovery that the content of some of Gonzaga's letters can be traced to a repertory collection called the Concetti di Ieronimo Garimberto, published in 1551. Steland's description of the corresponding passages is clearly valuable for the light it sheds on the way Gonzaga's text was constructed with material from a repertory. Yet an attribution to Lando of the collection as a whole based solely on similar textual strategy — that of incorporating existing texts into one's own — is not convincing, for letter-writers frequently turned to repertories and manuals for guidance.

More indicative of a Landian influence in Gonzaga's Lettere is the appearance of the same lines from Garimberto in Lando's own works as well as in Gonzaga's letters. For example, a letter from Gonzaga to Pietro Paolo Manfrone that asserts that unjust imprisonment is preferable to undeserved liberty can be traced to the Concetti, but could also have reached Gonzaga via Lando's Oracoli de moderni ingegni (1550).Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Lando could have added this internal reference himself; on the other hand, Gonzaga may have borrowed the phrase from either Lando or Garimberto. Similarly, a consolatory letter from Gonzaga to a grieving mother, warning her not to mourn excessively nor doubt in the resurrection of the body, echoes a sentiment expressed in Lando's Consolatorie.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Does a thematic, and even linguistic, link between the two texts deny the possibility of Gonzaga's authorship? Or does it merely demonstrate that Gonzaga and Lando shared similar views? The idea that we ought to rejoice in, rather than lament, the death of a loved one is unremarkable in consolatory letters of this period. Pietro Lauro uses similar reasoning in a consolatory letter addressed to Gonzaga herself, while a manuscript letter of consolation written by Gonzaga includes the same sentiment.Footnote ¹⁰² Framing death as a welcome return to God is a concept particular neither to Lando nor Gonzaga. However, the brief (and similarly phrased) flirtation with the denial of the resurrection of the body put forth in both cases could denote a more specific point of contact. Again, this textual overlap might indicate Lando's editorial influence on the passage. Alternatively, Gonzaga may have borrowed some of the elegant wording of Lando's Consolatorie for her own discussion of the concepts of death and resurrection.

Silvana Seidel Menchi points out a final area of textual intersection: her attribution of Gonzaga's Lettere to Lando is based on several letters that espouse Erasmian (and, by 1552, suspect) themes taken up by Lando in his own work. Seidel Menchi notes, for example, that a letter from Gonzaga to Elena Vigonza urging her to make Christ's teachings of simplicity, charity, and patience her life's principal aspiration closely echoes an Italian translation of Erasmus's Enchiridion, a text used by Lando on other occasions.Footnote ¹⁰³ However, Lando was not the only writer to make use of Erasmus in his works, as Seidel Menchi herself points out.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Furthermore, Seidel Menchi notes that the insertion of passages from Erasmus, Luther, and other philo-Protestant thinkers into otherwise orthodox texts was a common method for attempting to elicit thoughts and doubts about traditional theology and teachings.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ While it is possible that Lando was responsible for the insertion of these passages as he edited Gonzaga's letters, it is also possible that Gonzaga shared the religious views of Lando and others in the heterodox circles of which she was a part, and that she was familiar with the practice of inserting heterodox passages into new texts.

Ultimately, the most likely indication of Lando's collaboration in Gonzaga's text is the remarkable frequency of his appearances in it. Lando is more present than any other destinatario in Gonzaga's collection, suggesting that he and Gonzaga were in active dialogue during the production of this volume. A number of playful letters chronicle the gossip and criticism that periodically endanger Gonzaga's relationship with Lando, initially calling to mind Lando's own Valorose donne, in which his female epistolarians constantly accuse one another of similar offenses. For example, Gonzaga rebukes Lando, saying that a mutual friend “told me clearly, by letter and in person, that you heard I had spoken ill of you, which caused my heart great distress. . . . I can't believe, however, that you would think so little of me, that I could have used words so alien to my nature”; and, again, scolding that “Every day I feel more taken in by the depth of my affection for you, and you doubt that I love you? And you can believe that some gossiping tongue could impede the direction of my goodwill?”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Although Gonzaga's interest in gossip here is to dismiss it, a letter to Bonardo, another close friend, frames gossip as a useful vehicle for information. Gonzaga urges Bonardo to keep her posted with all the news from Venice, no matter how mundane, an attitude that is reflected in a manuscript letter by Gonzaga to yet another acquaintance in which she begs for news of her friend's Ferrarese life and loves. As can be seen in the passages quoted below, the theme of news — or gossip — is characteristic of both the published Lettere and Gonzaga's manuscript correspondence:

If some letters to Lando center on gossiping tongues, others touch on literary matters. These missives might be interpreted as Lando's effort to draw attention to himself, or as Gonzaga's own repayment for his lavish praise of her. In one instance, for example, Gonzaga thanks Lando for immortalizing her in “little books that contain my ill-deserved praise” and expresses regret that she is unable to do the same for him: “but, poor me . . . what shall I do for you?”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Elsewhere, Gonzaga tells Lando that she loves him “for your virtue, and the many things you do in my honor.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ These things might well refer to Lando's public praise of Gonzaga in such texts as the Panegirici and the Cataloghi. Another letter that refers to Gonzaga's indebtedness toward Lando draws attention to her own generosity as a literary patron. Gonzaga declares her willingness to support Lando materially, asking in return only that he share his work with her: “ask freely for anything that strikes your fancy . . . if you think I might have anything at all that could result in your honor or comfort, such as money or anything else I can provide, I promise you that my sincere wish that you will avail yourself of it corresponds to the obligation I have that you should avail yourself of it . . . be healthy and happy, and share with me any works that your divine and fertile mind might produce.”Footnote ¹¹¹ In the Cataloghi Lando praises Gonzaga's generosity; here she returns the favor not only by behaving generously, but by praising Lando's literary gifts and “divine” mind. (If the sentiment appears genuine, it is worth noting that this passage derives directly from Garimberto's Concetti.)Footnote ¹¹² By asking to read his works, moreover, Gonzaga appears learned as well as generous.

This constant invocation of Lando is certainly not coincidental. These letters have a dual function: they promote Lando and call attention to his relationship with Gonzaga, while simultaneously presenting Gonzaga as an admired member of literary society, capable of reading and appreciating the works of her contemporaries. The publicity benefits both Lando and Gonzaga, and the elaborate intertwining of their personas here and in Lando's other works, along with their similar intertextual practice, suggests some degree of literary collaboration in the production of Gonzaga's Lettere, without, however, negating her role as the letters' author.Footnote ¹¹³ As William E. A. Axon notes, “That [Lando] should forge three hundred letters, print them with [Gonzaga's] name on the title, and dedicate them to her relation Pietro Paolo Manfrone, and do this without reproof or repudiation, is incredible. That he acted as her secretary in the composition of many of these epistles is a much more reasonable theory.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Surely Lando could not have produced this work without Gonzaga's assent and participation. The evidence I have presented here strongly suggests that this collaboration was an active one in which Gonzaga herself contributed the core material for her epistolario, while Lando likely helped to polish it and shape it for the literary market.

Lando's Panegirici, the model that shaped subsequent eulogies of Gonzaga by her contemporaries, demonstrates how this collaboration took shape. Published the same year as Gonzaga's letterbook, the portrait offered by the Panegirici — most of which is based on fact, embroidered to emphasize her status as an exemplary figure of female virtue — is the male-authored complement to that offered by the Lettere themselves. It lays out Gonzaga's biography in romantic terms, recounting historically accurate details of her life in a manner that emphasizes her exemplary feminine virtue. The Panegirici makes much of the contrast between Gonzaga and her husband: she the epitome of innocence and goodness, he of wickedness. It emphasizes her young age at marriage and her mistreatment at the hands of Manfrone, whose “harsh reproaches,” “bestial actions,” and “reprehensible habits” she bears with admirable fortitude.Footnote ¹¹⁵ It praises the combination of feminine loyalty and masculine courage with which she greets the news of her husband's arrest for attempting to murder the Duke of Ferrara, an episode that was widely documented.Footnote ¹¹⁶ It underscores the loneliness of the years she spent in her husband's palazzo in Fratta.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Despite her wretched circumstances, we learn in the Panegirici that through her virtue and intelligence Gonzaga was able to make of Fratta an “earthly paradise,” a haven of literature, culture, and even political debate, presumably through the cenacolo she helped organize and host: “Every time I pass through Fratta, gentlemen, it seems to me that I go to an earthly paradise, so numerous are the consolations I feel upon hearing her read with perfect Roman pronunciation, and hearing her discuss matters of state with a wisdom worthy of ancient Athens.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Using a technique characteristic of many of his works, including the Valorose donne, Lando compares Gonzaga throughout the Panegirici to long catalogues of famous women. Gonzaga equals or outshines them all. In the words of the author, this is a portrait of female virtue to rival any produced by the most famous artists, “the portrait of the most singular woman I have ever known: nor was it created by the brush of Michelangelo or Titian, but by the pen of a writer who is the enemy of lies and flattery, and a stranger, more than any other, to every passion.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ It is, therefore, one in which Lando's role as writer and Gonzaga's as muse and model are of equal import.

If the Panegirici writes the exemplary biography of Gonzaga, Lando's Dialogo on scripture recounts the story of her spiritual development. Previously, in the Vera tranquillità dell'animo, Lando had granted to Isabella Sforza the role of spiritual advisor. Now, in the role of the guide Philalete, he relocates himself, assuming an increased masculine authority while also positioning Gonzaga as a student worthy to take up the mantle of religious reform subsequent to his instruction. In a kind of Socratic dialogue, Philalete counsels Lucrezia on points including the interpretation and centrality of the Gospels, criticism of religious ritual, and justification by faith alone. He explains, for example, that “all the faithful are priests of the inner priesthood, and not the external. You will learn that neither words, nor miracles, nor ceremonies make us Christians, but only the renewal of our true life.”Footnote ¹²⁰ He urges her to study no other text but scripture, and praises the community of the elect. These were all ideas that circulated in the heterodox religious culture of Italy in these years, and women were deeply involved in their dissemination, as seen in the linking of Isabella Sforza to the Vera tranquillità dell'animo. Models for the theological dialogue between Philalete and Lucrezia can be found in earlier works that center on conversations between a male religious counselor and a female disciple, for example, Bernardino Ochino's Dialogi sette with Caterina Cibo or (perhaps a closer model) the Alfabeto Cristiano, a dialogue between Juan de Valdés and Giulia Gonzaga, major figures in the spirituali movement. Like the dialogue of Philalete and Lucrezia, the Alfabeto cristiano, published in 1545, emphasizes the interiority of faith and draws its narrative power from the real friendship between the interlocutors.Footnote ¹²¹ As Robin maintains, one might view Giulia, whose conversations figure so centrally in the dialogue, as the coauthor, with Valdés, of this work, for her persona and reputation are central to the way in which this text produces meaning.Footnote ¹²² We might say the same for Lando's Dialogo, which is ostensibly founded upon his own conversations with Lucrezia, emphasizing her ability to grasp complex issues of faith despite her young age and her sex.Footnote ¹²³ The volume marks the transformation of Gonzaga from a woman of merely literary authority, adept in the study of classical and humanist texts, to one of spiritual and moral authority, who now renounces any text other than the Gospels. The Dialogo on scripture establishes Gonzaga's religious and spiritual reputation, offering a portrait of Gonzaga that both complements and expands upon that painted by the Panegirici.

Following her appearance in the Panegirici and the Dialogo on scripture — in addition to the fame she had acquired in chronicles describing Manfrone's arrest — Gonzaga's reputation was sufficiently established to ensure that her Lettere would find an audience. In fact, the Lettere elaborate on many of the themes addressed in the Panegirici and in the dialogue on the Sacre Scritture, enveloping heterodox religious points, such as justification through faith alone and the primacy of scripture, within the narrative frame of Manfrone's apprehension by the duke's men and Gonzaga's efforts to free him. Given the unsympathetic portrait they provide, it is no accident that the letters appeared in 1552, the year of Manfrone's death: freed from the weight of her imprisoned husband's reputation, Gonzaga could now publicly affirm the negative place he had earned in the popular imagination without undermining her own status as a faithful and admirable wife. Indeed, the story of Manfrone's arrest and imprisonment was well known, described in contemporary chronicles and canzonieri. For example, the Rime of Pier Francesco Bertioli da Ostiglia, who was accused of conspiring with Manfrone, offered a poetic account of the episode that circulated with a detailed gloss by Andrea Alciato between 1546 and 1549. In a series of twelve Petrarchan sonnets, Bertioli described Manfrone's plot and his own capture, seeking to justify, through verse, his betrayal of Manfrone under torture, as in sonnet 2, which explains, “I was led to Ferrara and to torture / that I might tell what I knew, and tell the truth,” and again in sonnet 9, “The sentence was justly passed, / That Manfrone should lose his head, / and that to me be granted liberty, / the liberty I dearly longed for.”Footnote ¹²⁴ Other accounts, from Rodi's Annuali di Ferrara to that of the doctor who treated the duke after Manfrone's first attempt on his life, provided other details of the episode.Footnote ¹²⁵ What Gonzaga's Lettere add to the story is a record of her own agency, born on Manfrone's behalf but transformed into a true literary project, one that fitted neatly into the prevailing sixteenth-century fashion for vernacular letterbooks. Manfrone's disgrace motivates Gonzaga to write letters, out of feminine duty and as a consolatory endeavor, offsetting any suggestion of audacity in the publication of a volume of personal correspondence. For example, in the very first letter of the collection, Gonzaga tells her sister-in-law Emilia — wife of Gonzaga's brother Carlo, Count of Sanmartino — that only through study can she forget her unhappiness; writing itself she describes as a defense against the blows of fortune: “I can find few remedies capable of freeing my heart from the many troubles that gather around it . . . I try to spend a good part of the time in study . . . in order to outwit the grief that presses on me so heavily . . . but if my fortune will not change, either of its own accord or that of others, I will change it myself, aware from long experience that it is useless to struggle with it, and if I cannot fight against it with deeds, at least I can fight it with words and I give some vent to my grief by lamenting it.”Footnote ¹²⁶ The literary trope of writing as consolation — via the saga of Manfrone's arrest, imprisonment, and death — is thus enlisted to frame Gonzaga's act of authorial self-assertion in publishing a book of lettere familiari, not unlike Vittoria Colonna's poems mourning her own husband (albeit in different circumstances) some years earlier. The true subject of these letters, however, is not Manfrone's disgrace or death, but rather Gonzaga's own efforts to define herself as a literary figure and to articulate her deeply felt religious views. Her epistolary self-presentation as a long-suffering, devoted wife functions as the outward justification for another kind of literary project.

A significant part of this project concerns Gonzaga's efforts to gain legitimacy as a literary figure — both a writer and a critic — as evidenced by her network of correspondents, which includes so many of the Pastori frattegiani. However, in keeping with the portrait painted in Lando's Dialogo and with what we know about Gonzaga's real involvement with heterodox culture, the Lettere reveal a deeper subtext of spiritualismo, one that links Gonzaga not only to the views of Lando, but to those of Valdés, Ochino, and many others. In one letter, for example, Gonzaga makes the point that faith, not pilgrimage — that is, works or ritual — brings us closer to God: “if you wish to be a Christian, you needn't have constant pilgrimage to all the holy places as your primary goal. Not that I condemn such a goal, but I tell you truly that faith is the only door to Christ, and it is better to study his scripture that was inspired by his spirit.”Footnote ¹²⁷ Repeatedly, Gonzaga's letters on scripture implicitly and explicitly locate the writer within a community of elect souls, those who have embarked on the true road to Christ, further situating the Lettere within the criteria of evangelist letter collections.Footnote ¹²⁸ This spiritual positioning is evident in a letter to Francesco Carrettona describing the joys of true faith. “Do you wish to taste true joy? Taste the happiness of a pure conscience,” Gonzaga advises. “Do you wish to sample the most exquisite victuals there are? Sample them in the study of holy scripture. Do you wish to experience the warmest and most welcoming company there is? Experience the community of the faithful and the gathering of the righteous.”Footnote ¹²⁹ Clearly, the “community of the faithful” and the “gathering of the righteous” constitute a group of God's elect of which Gonzaga feels she is a part and for whom she is authorized to speak. Similarly, Gonzaga reprimands an anonymous correspondent for not respecting God or his elect, thus excluding him from that group while including herself. A letter to Thomaso Ferufino refers to the small but select group of Christ's true followers: “following Christ may appeal to few, but those few will be esteemed the best.”Footnote ¹³⁰

Gonzaga takes pains to justify herself as a woman possessed of the moral authority to speak on religious matters. In one of several letters that offers guidance and criticism to religious leaders, she confidently assures her correspondent that when he hears a certain “fra Cherubino” preach, “you will say that Lucrezia Gonzaga not only knows how to use a [sewing] needle, but she is also a good judge of preachers.”Footnote ¹³¹ Elsewhere, she acts as an advisor to fra Giovanfrancesco Libertà Trevigiano, encouraging him to continue composing his “learned” and “devout” sermons devoted to the teachings of the Gospels.Footnote ¹³² Another letter responds to her sister Camilla's doubts about how best to pray to God, thus assuming a position of authority over a cloistered nun.Footnote ¹³³ Gonzaga advises Camilla to be heartfelt, but not overly lengthy, in her prayers, citing the words of Paul (a touchstone for Italian evangelism): “Paul praises five words, more than ten thousand that are offered only with the lips and not understood.”Footnote ¹³⁴

Finally, in addition to reiterating the religious views expressed in the previous letters, a letter explaining how to draw closer to Christ may provide a key to interpreting the moral letters we have discussed here. To be “with Christ,” Gonzaga declares, we must leave behind all vice: “We must abandon ambition, pride, sloth, delight, pleasure, lust, unbridled desires, and dishonest appetites.”Footnote ¹³⁵ Thus the letters on vice in the volume that deal with precisely these issues of ambition, pride, and lust, as well as the story of Manfrone, which functions as a kind of morality tale, not only set up Gonzaga as a moral figure attempting to guide her readers by turning them away from such vices, but also fit into her larger spiritual consciousness. To be part of the elect means to transcend these vices. The moral and spiritual letters are intertwined, mutually ancillary aspects of Gonzaga's epistolario.

The religious aspect of Gonzaga's letters is central to our understanding of the volume as a whole, for together with the narrative and literary elements, it constitutes the third of three principal threads — autobiographical, literary, and spiritual — that together form Gonzaga's epistolary persona. These compositions not only help us to understand better where Gonzaga stood within the complex, shifting territory of religious debate in the early 1550s, but they also shed further light on her objectives for the published volume. Not only did Gonzaga's letterbook aim to create an enduring public representation of its author, it also sought to disseminate her religious convictions through the popular new vehicle of the vernacular letterbook. Finally, the religious content of Gonzaga's letters links her to Lando and to their literary and spiritual partnership. The ideas she expresses that privilege scripture, justification by faith, and the community of the elect are all present in Lando's Dialogo on scripture. There Gonzaga plays the role of a student, bright and well educated, but obediently led by her teacher. In the epistolario she has become the teacher, assuming the active role played by many women within the evangelist movement in Italy. Lando's clear fascination with Gonzaga, as demonstrated by his representation of her in the Valorose donne, the Dialogo, and the Panegirici, suggests that her Lettere might be seen as part of a broader Landian project to promote Gonzaga and, through her, his own religious views. At the same time, however, it is difficult to separate Lando's views from Gonzaga's, for they shared a common interest in evangelism as well as in literature, the former attested to by Gonzaga's later Inquistion trial, the latter by the praise of her contemporaries. As the nineteenth-century critic Pietro Ferri judiciously pointed out, it is unlikely that the precise degree of Lando's intervention (or lack thereof) in Gonzaga's text can ever be definitively known.Footnote ¹³⁶ A more productive way of thinking about Gonzaga's letters is to see them in the context of a broader partnership between her and Lando, one that unfolded against the backdrop of early modern Italian evangelismo. Rather than diminish Gonzaga's literary agency, such a collaboration can help us to refine our ideas about authorship and book production in the sixteenth century.

To return to our original question, then, does the sex of a text matter? In an article on female impersonations in English Renaissance literature, Elizabeth D. Harvey writes that “ventriloquism is an appropriation of the female voice [that] reflects and contributes to a larger cultural silencing of women.”Footnote ¹³⁷ That is, when male writers write as women, they speak for them, substituting the authentic speech of women with the views of male society. At the same time, however, such cases of ventriloquism illustrate the fundamentally artificial nature of gender distinctions, as Harvey (following Judith Butler) goes on to argue. When assuming a gendered persona, deliberately or otherwise, all authors, male and female, variously assume, incorporate, challenge, and subvert cultural conventions and notions regarding gender. In the case of Ortensio Lando's adoption of the persona of Lucrezia Gonzaga, whether in the Valorose donne or in the Panegirici and the Dialogo, what appears most significant is the way that this persona is made to exemplify ideal feminine virtues and a particular religious sensibility. When coupled with Gonzaga's own Lettere, a deeper layer of Lando's appropriation is revealed, demonstrating it to be not an act of silencing, but rather one of giving voice, a dynamic collaboration between literary and spiritual partners, with Gonzaga contributing actively to the construction of her own literary persona. Initially undertaken by Lando, the project of establishing Gonzaga's literary, moral, and spiritual reputation shifts to Gonzaga herself. The resulting epistolary portrait demonstrates not only how gender could be performed in the epistolary context, with Lucrezia Gonzaga's persona functioning as a model of exemplary womanhood, but also, and most importantly, how sixteenth-century texts were so often born not of the efforts of a single author, but from the influence and cooperation of individuals linked to one another by common literarary, cultural, and religious vews.