The Venetian courtesan has long captured the imagination as a female symbol
of sexual license. What then to make of the honest courtesan, who recast virtue
as intellectual integrity. Veronico Franco was such a woman and this text
reveals in her writing a passionate support for defedeless women.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.
