language > Torquato Tasso and Female Patrons: A New Reading History

February 26, 2026

The Italian Cultural Institute of Washington, in collaboration with the Department of Italian Studies of Georgetown University, presents “Torquato Tasso and Female Patrons: A New Reading History“, a talk by Dr. Kate Driscoll.

Torquato Tasso (1544–1595), Italy’s finest poet at the twilight of the Renaissance, has long been cast as a solitary figure. Romantic visualizations of Tasso’s years at the Este court of Ferrara repeatedly depict him as withdrawn and enclosed, confined by order of Duke Alfonso II and sealed into a legacy of neglect and abandonment. But how accurate is this history, and whose presence has it obscured?

This talk reframes Tasso’s writings and legacy by shifting attention from his enforced isolation to the network of women readers who sustained his work as patrons, interlocutors, and mediators. Tracing correspondence, dedicatory practices, manuscript circulation, and poetic exchange, this discussion draws from Dr. Driscoll’s book, Tasso and Women Readers: Literary Hospitality in Early Modern Italy, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in Fall 2026. This work proposes reading as a dynamically reciprocal practice through which Tasso sought the engagement and responses of female patrons—beginning with those of the Este House—whose interpretive authority could redirect and, at times, challenge ducal power. Re-centering these women in the history of Tasso’s writings reveals a dense ecology of support that shaped the poet’s reception among later women readers well into the twentieth century, both within and beyond Italy.

LOCATION
Embassy of Italy
3000 Whitehaven Street, NW
Washington, DC 20008

KATE DRISCOLLKate Driscoll is Assistant Professor of Italian and Romance Studies at Duke University. She is the author of Tasso and Women Readers: Literary Hospitality in Early Modern Italy, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in Fall 2026. This study was awarded the 28th annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies from the Modern Language Association. Her research centers on early modern literature, classical and romance epic poetry, women’s writing, gender studies, and Baroque performance history. Her articles on these and related topics have appeared in Renaissance Quarterly, I Tatti Studies, Letteratura cavalleresca italiana, altrelettere, California Italian Studies, and The Italianist, with published and forthcoming book chapters on female ambassadors in works by Tasso and Antonio Vivaldi, and on the relationship between acoustics and affect in Tasso and Claudio Monteverdi.