This article locates Isabella Andreini as a self-reflexive mannerist artist who used her incarnation as an idealized neoplatonic innamorata to practise her sixteenth-century petrarchism on the stage. Examples from her poetry, letters and other writings show how consciously she worked to bring her rhetorical skills to bear on her stage performances in order to give her audiences transcendent experiences of the power of Love to transform them, and immortalize her as an artist worthy of eternal fame.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Kerr, R., (2025), "Isabella Andreini (Comica Gelosa 1560-1604): Petrarchism for the Theatre Public", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

  Copy Citation | Export metadata as... | JSON | CSV | RO-Crate | BibTex | EndNote

1. Quaderni d'italianistica

Original publication: Kerr, Rosalind. "Isabella Andreini (Comica Gelosa 1560-1604): Petrarchism for the Theatre Public." Quaderni d'italianistica 27 (2): 2009. 71-92. DOI: 10.33137/q.i..v27i2.8579. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Quaderni d'italianistica. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Quaderni d'italianistica under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.