Barocker Reigen. Veronica Gambara, Martin Opitz, Sibylla Schwarz und der plurale Petrarchismus

Although Veronica Gambara was by no means an orthodox Petrarchist, Martin Opitz transfers seven of her poems into his Teutsche Poemata. In the process, the “signora della poesia” ultimately becomes a chilling example in the context of bourgeois Protestant ethics and court criticism. His translation of sonnets by a female author nevertheless motivated his contemporaries and paved their way into male communication refuges. Sibylla Schwarz, who had access to the rules and conventions of poetry through Opitz, sees such an achievement as an epochal historical process and act of literary liberation. There is evidence to suggest that she owes her perspective to Opitz’s teaching of Italian female Petrarchism. Sibylla does not simply transfer the Petrarchan model. Thanks to Opitz’s rendering of Gambara’s sonnets, she expresses criticism of the decay of love, appeals to morality and is therefore ahead of her time, as the controversy over Petrarchism only reached its climax in the late Baroque period.