The Venetian courtesan has long captured the imagination as a female symbol of sexual license, elegance, beauty, and unruliness. What then to make of the "cortigiana onesta" - the honest courtesan who recast virtue as intellectual integrity and offered wit and refinement in return for patronage and a place in public life? Veronica Franco (1546-1591) was such a woman, a writer and citizen of Venice, whose published poems and familiar letters offer rich testimony to the complexity of the honest courtesan's position. Margaret F. Rosenthal draws a compelling portrait of Veronica Franco in her cultural social, and economic world. Rosenthal reveals in Franco's writing a passionate support of defenseless women, strong convictions about inequality, and, in the eroticized language of her epistolary verses, the seductive political nature of all poetic contests. It is Veronica Franco's insight into the power conflicts between men and women - and her awareness of the threat she posed to her male contemporaries - that makes her literary works and her dealings with Venetian intellectuals so pertinent today. Combining the resources of biography, history, literary theory, and cultural criticism, this interdisciplinary work presents an eloquent and often moving account of one woman's life as an act of self-creation and as a complex response to social forces and cultural conditions.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Catharine R. Stimpson Acknowledgments Introduction 1: Satirizing the Courtesan: Franco's Enemies 2: Fashioning the Honest Courtesan: Franco's Patrons Appendix: Two Testaments and a Tax Report 3: Addressing Venice: Franco's Familiar Letters 4: Denouncing the Courtesan: Franco's Inquisition Trial and Poetic Debate Appendix: Documents of the Inquisition 5: The Courtesan in Exile: An Elegiac Future Notes Works Cited Index

Reviews

This first full-length study in English of Venetian courtesan and writer Veronica Franco's life and work is an adaptation of Rosenthal's (Italian, Univ. of Southern California) dissertation. Writing from a feminist, social-historical perspective, Rosenthal demonstrates that Franco worked within the literary traditions of 16th-century Venice, using her social position and her writings to argue against a restrictive, misogynistic definition of women. Despite scurrilous attacks, Franco defended the courtesan's role as having intellectual and artistic--rather than erotic--significance. Rosenthal is strongest when presenting historical background and analyzing specific poems and letters; her theoretical summations are occasionally marred by a strained use of the jargon of feminist criticism. Recommended for scholarly collections in women's studies and in Italian literature and history.-- Ellen Finnie Duranceau, MIT Lib.