In this vivid and ambitious study, Kate Driscoll uncovers the vibrant world of women who read, supported, and transformed the works of Torquato Tasso, one of the most prodigious poets of the Italian Renaissance. Drawing on rare archival materials, overlooked manuscripts, and visual evidence, she reveals how women readers – patrons, performers, and poets – shaped Tasso's writing and contributed to his enduring legacy. Moving beyond traditional accounts that cast women as passive recipients of male authorship, she demonstrates that they were instead active collaborators whose insights, conversations, and creative responses were integral to the making and meaning of premodern literary sociability. Through the frameworks of literary hospitality and horizontal patronage, she shows how networks of readers and writers crossed social and artistic boundaries, telling a compelling new story about how communities form around reading and how they survive over time. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Winner, 2025 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies, Modern Language Association of America

Winner, 2026 Weiss-Brown Publication Subvention Award, Newberry Library

‘Through a refreshingly innovative emphasis on the reciprocal relationships between author and reader and between the literary and performing arts, Kate Driscoll's impressive book reveals the debt that Torquato Tasso owed to women as patrons, interlocutors, collaborators, and fellow social beings and his role as muse and mentor for women authors.'

Brian Richardson - Emeritus Professor of Italian Language, University of Leeds