{"product_id":"the-honest-courtesan-veronica-franco-citizen-and-writer-in-sixteenthcentury-venice-women-in-culture-and-society","title":"The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in SixteenthCentury Venice (Women in Culture and Society)","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe 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 onestathe 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 (15461591) 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 courtesans position.Margaret F. Rosenthal draws a compelling portrait of Veronica Franco in her cultural social, and economic world. Rosenthal reveals in Francos 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 Francos insight into the power conflicts between men and womenand her awareness of the threat she posed to her male contemporariesthat 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 sophisticated interdisciplinary work presents an eloquent and often moving account of one womans life as an act of selfcreation and as a complex response to social forces and cultural conditions.A book . . . pleasurably redolent of Venice in the 16thcentury. Rosenthal gives a vivid sense of a world of salons and coteries, of intricate networks of family and patronage, and of literary exchanges both intellectual and erotic.Helen Hackett, Times Higher Education SupplementThe Honest Courtesan is the basis for the film Dangerous Beauty (1998) directed by Marshall Herskovitz. (The film was retitled The Honest Courtesan for release in the UK and Europe in 1999.)\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University of Chicago Press","offers":[{"title":"Rosenthal, Margaret F. \/ paperback","offer_id":47844712677621,"sku":"SONG0226728129","price":10.26,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/5804\/8501\/files\/71FUtBOyYIL.jpg?v=1773817890","url":"https:\/\/ergodebooks.com\/products\/the-honest-courtesan-veronica-franco-citizen-and-writer-in-sixteenthcentury-venice-women-in-culture-and-society","provider":"Ergodebooks","version":"1.0","type":"link"}