All Aboard the Storm-Tossed Ship: Sailing toward Fame in Petrarch, Stampa, Spenser, and Cavendish

Afterlives of Petrarch's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 189 have produced an outsized emphasis on the poem's legacy of figuring a cruel mistress in the experience of unrequited love. This essay identifies a group of lyrics that adapt the ship similitude of Rvf 189 from the perspective of Rvf 261, thereby crafting an alternative legacy that emphasizes the literary generativity of the lady of Petrarch's verse. In Rvf 261, Petrarch portrays Laura as an unreachable exemplar for women aspiring to virtues that would earn them fame. Despite its assertion of Laura's unattainability, the poem presents a challenge that some subsequent poets suggest they meet. By likening the self to a storm-tossed ship specifically to authorize the female pursuit of fame, Gaspara Stampa, Edmund Spenser, and Margaret Cavendish constellate a writing community that transcends gender, linguistic, generic, and educational lines as they take up Petrarch's invitation of Rvf 261 in their recreations of Rvf 189.