The Disperata, from Medieval Italy to Renaissance France

Rich with morose invectives, the lyric genre of the disperata builds toward a crescendo of despair, with the speakers damning and condemning their beloved, their patron, their enemy, their destiny, Fortune, Love and often themselves. Although Petrarch and Petrarchism have been amply analyzed as fertile sources for late Renaissance poets in France, the influence of the Italian disperata in this context has yet to receive proper scholarly attention. This book explores the beginning of the disperata and its main interpreters in Trecento Italy, its fortune in the Northern and Southern Italian courts, and finally its success as a prolific source of imitation at the court of the late Valois. Furthermore, it investigates the genre's interplay with gender in the female-voiced disperate written in a ventriloquized female voice by Italian and French male poets, as well as those authored by Isabella di Morra, the only female poet to write disperate.