The Armed Maiden of the Sixteenth Century and the Unmaking of Tasso’s Clorinda (original) (raw)

Poetic, cultural, and religious reformers directed their attention to narrative poetry during the counter-reformation, and one of the figures that stood in the ideological crosshairs was the female knight. Literary theories of verisimilitude and historicity caused some unease about the relationship between fictional women knights and real women warriors. Writers, concerned with the interrelation of poetic form and female decorum, raised questions about the morality of women's militancy both on and off the page. Torquato Tasso (1544-1595) contributed to these debates in treatises on poetic theory and feminine virtue, as well as in defenses of his Christian epic, Gerusalemme liberata, the text that introduced Clorinda, the best-known female knight in the counter-reformation canon. This chapter will briefly explore how warrior women (fictional and historical) are situated in the literary and philosophical debates of the sixteenth century, and it will consider how Tasso navigated literary and social conventions in order to create a poem that featured warrior women in an uncomfortable relationship to poetic orthodoxy. The chapter will conclude with an analysis of Liberata XII, the canto where Clorinda first learns her origin story as well as the canto in which she battles Tancredi, converts to Christianity, and dies. My reading will challenge a scholarly tradition that has labeled Clorinda's death a revelation of an "authentic" non-militant self. My argument claims instead that her death foregrounds the very same conflict that Tasso raised in his prose writings about militancy and women's decorum; rather than revealing her militancy to be a "mask," Clorinda's death exposes her inability to escape the gender script that circumscribed her as a vulnerable woman despite her lived reality as a virago. The warrior woman was thus a locus of experimentation in Counter-Reformation poetics, and she rightly finds herself in this volume dedicated to innovation in the period.