16th century
A01=Margaret F. Rosenthal
adaptation
Author_Margaret F. Rosenthal
authorship
biography
book to film
Category=DNBH
Category=JBSF1
Category=NHD
Category=NHTB
citizenship
cortigiana onesta
courtesan
dangerous beauty
demi monde
elegance
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
femininity
feminism
gender
history
inquisition
italy
letters
mistress
nonfiction
patriarchy
patronage
prostitution
public sphere
sex work
sexuality
trial
venice
veronica franco
virtue
women
Product details
- ISBN 9780226728124
- Weight: 624g
- Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 01 Feb 1993
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
