Textual Collaboration and Spiritual Partnership in Sixteenth-Century Italy: The Case of Ortensio Lando and Lucrezia Gonzaga^*

Abstract

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 ofLetterepublished 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.

“In My Own Hand”: Costanza Colonna and the Art of the Letter in Sixteenth-Century Italy*

“… 20 Ray, 2009a, 695, demonstrates the reciprocity of one relationship between male and female collaborator, Ortensio Lando and Lucrezia Gonzaga; more generally, she writes, Lando was a serial collaborator with eminent women who furthered “the manufacture of female cultural reputation.” …”