The Courtesan's Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives

425 Pages·2006·25.29 MB·English

by  Martha Feldman

The Courtesan's Arts
Luis Berrueco (fl. 1727-1749), Encounter with Four Women. Municipal Hospital (Ex-Convent
of San Juan de Dios), Atlixco, Puebla, Mexico. Courtesy of the Honorable Town Council of
Atlixco.
Berrueco's aurally evocative painting depicts St. John of God in a sumptuous bedchamber
beseeching four courtesans to leave their profession. The asceticism of the sixteenth-century
Portuguese saint, who kneels on the floor wearing only a brown cloak and clutching rosary
beads, contrasts sharply with the luxury of the courtesans, whose trappings include clothing
made of colorful fabric, pearl bracelets and other jewelry, mirrors, beauty spots, a carpet, and a
dressing screen. As a negrita servant watches in exasperation, the saint's chanted prayers seem
to interrupt a session of music-making in which the courtesans had been playing the Spanish
harp and guitar, probably as accompaniment to singing. Ironically, the saint's state of undress,
coupled with the particularly luxuriant bed, alludes to the sexual basis of courtesanry while
his asceticism highlights the courtesans' acquisition of the art objects and wealth. Following
Novohispanic custom, a caption in the corner uses rhyming verse to explain the scenario.
The Courtesan's Arts
Cross-Cultural Perspectives
Edited by
Martha Feldman and Bonnie Gordon
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
2OO6
OXPORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The courtesan's arts : cross-cultural perspectives / edited by
Martha Feldman and Bonnie Gordon.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-517028-3; 978-0-19-517029-0 (pbk.)
i. Courtesans—History—Cross-cultural studies. I. Feldman, Martha.
II. Gordon, Bonnie, 1968-
HQui.C682oo6
3o6.74'2!o862i—dc22 2005047340
4 6 8 9 7 53
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For
Emily and Rebecca
and
Rebecca and Jonathan
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Acknowledgments
tThis book realizes a dream of many years' standing. We have first to thank the
Women's Board of the University of Chicago for making it possible. They gave
their most generous support to the project at the conference stage and again at the
publication stage. Without their help we could never have done this book in style.
Our heartfelt thanks are owed to all of them, as well as to Gretel Braidwood, of De-
velopment at the University of Chicago.
We have many others to thank for support in kind. The State University of New
York at Stony Brook contributed crucial collaborative support toward making the CD
insert, as did the Music Department of the University of Chicago. Critical funding
toward the conference that brought together the authors included in this volume was
provided by the Roger Weiss and Howard Mayer Brown fund of the Department of
Music at the University of Chicago, along with funding from the Adelyn Russell Bo-
gert Fund of the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Committee on South Asian
Studies, the Dean of the Humanities, and the Newberry Library Consortium Com-
mittee, all of the University of Chicago. Our special thanks to Thomas Christensen
and Robert L. Kendrick, past and present chairs, respectively, of the Department of
Music at the University of Chicago, as well as the Dean Emeritus of the Humanities
Division, Janel Mueller, and the Chair of the Music Department at SUNY Stony
Brook, Jody Lochhead.
Martha Feldman's work on the volume was partially supported by a grant for
University Teachers from the National Endowment for the Humanities and from the
Humanities Division of the University of Chicago, and Bonnie Gordon's likewise by
the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe University.
Our editorial assistants helped shorten the making of this book. Martha Feldman's
Research Assistant Drew Edward Davies worked with great intelligence through
all the early and middle editorial stages of this volume. Cordelia Chenault, Bonnie
Gordon's Research Assistant at Stony Brook, lent invaluable assistance on the CD
and illustrations. Additional thanks go to Deborah Heckert, who worked with Bon-
nie on earlier editorial stages, and especially to Shawn Marie Keener, who worked
viii Acknowledgments
tirelessly with Martha at the conference stage, wrote a wonderful program essay for
the concert of the Newberry Consort, created our website, and stepped in again with
great energy and intelligence at the stages of manuscript submission and copyediting.
Meredith Ray, our Program Assistant for the conference and now Assistant Professor
of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Delaware, was our ace in
the hole throughout all the critical phases of conference planning and execution.
Special thanks are due to the Newberry Consort for its superlative work in con-
suiting with Martha Feldman and her seminar, putting together a beautiful concert
on April 5, 2002 for the conference, giving permission to include performances on
the CD included here, and recording other examples separately on short notice. In
particular we want to thank the Consort's Director and gambist, Mary Springfels,
soprano Ellen Hargis, and violinist David Douglas, as well as harpsichordist David
Schrader, lutenist John Lenti, and gambists Craig Trompeter and Ken Perlow. Past
managers of the Consort, Fred Liese and Alex Bonus, were helpful through many
stages of this project, and most especially has been the present Manager Ken Perlow,
who oversaw arrangements for a recent recording of examples for the CD.
Our most vigorous thanks to the brilliant grand master of kathak dance, Pandit
Chitresh Das, Artistic Director of the Chitresh Das Dance Company, and his prin-
cipal dancer Jaiwanti Pamnani, for a stunning performance-demonstration of kathak
dance on April 6, 2002.
We give special thanks also to Andrew Natoli for his skilled mastering of the
CD. Kelly Foreman helped immensely with locating audio examples, and Miki
Keneda, Miho Matsugu, and Janis Mimura helped with various translation issues.
The Law Office of Linda Mensch, P.C., as well as Norm Hirschy, Editorial Assistant
for Music at Oxford University Press, helped greatly with obtaining permissions for
the CD examples.
Carla Zecher of the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library was
a linchpin in staging the conference that led to this volume. We wish to thank her
most particularly as well as the staff of her Center.
We are extremely grateful to those who read the manuscript or portions of it at
various stages. Especially encouraging were the initial readers for Oxford University
Press, Jane A. Bernstein and an anonymous reader. Judith T. Zeitlin consulted with
us repeatedly at all stages in developing the project, which included critical advice
on assembling the participants and commenting on the Introduction. Norma Field
and Christopher A. Faraone consulted with us often about possible contributors and
intellectual directions. Dorothy Ko also consulted with us during the earlier stages
of the project. Also invaluable was the extensive reading and advice of our partners,
Patricia Barber and Manuel Lerdau. We also thank Patricia for bringing her expertise
as a producer and recording artist to our editing of the CD insert.
Martha Feldman wishes to thank all of the members of her research seminar
on "The Courtesan's Voice in Early Modern Italy," including Lyndal Andrews, Drew
Edward Davies, Dawn De Rycke, Justin Flosi, Shawn Marie Keener, and Courtney
Quaintance. Keener's fine essay, "Virtue, Illusion, Venezianita: Vocal Bravura and the
Early Cortigiana Onesta," was sought out by another volume, now published, Musi-
cal Voices of Early Modern Women: Many-Headed Melodies, ed. Thomasin K. LaMay
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).
Acknowledgments ix
We owe additional thanks to session chairs Kyeong-Hee Choi, Assistant Profes-
sor, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, the University of Chicago; Joan Erd-
man, anthropologist and performing arts scholar at Columbia College and Research
Associate in the Committee on South Asian Studies at the University of Chicago;
James M. Redfield, Professor of Classics; and Elissa Weaver, Professor of Romance
Languages and Literatures, both of the University of Chicago. Robert Kendrick and
Chika Kinoshita contributed fine papers for the conference but were not able to
contribute to the volume.
The administrator of the Music Department at the University of Chicago, Kathy
Holmes, provided tireless administrative and budgetary support. Our thanks to her
for always making the impossible possible, with sweetness and humor.
The musical examples were expertly prepared by Drew Edward Davies and the
index equally so by Melissa Reilly.
Many people traveled long distances to attend the conference as auditors, among
them Mary C. Dalton, Kelly Foreman, Eugenic Giusti, and Sheila Schonbrun. We
were moved by their special efforts and commitment.
Finally, our warmest thanks to Kim Robinson, Music Editor at Oxford Univer-
sity Press, New York, at the time we contracted this book, who believed in it from
the beginning, and her expert Editorial Assistants, Eve Bachrach and later Norm
Hirschy, as well as other members of the Oxford team, including Bob Milks, Senior
Production Editor, and Suzanne Ryan, the new Music Editor. It is impossible to ex-
press enough our gratitude to Bonnie Blackburn, who embraced this project com-
pletely and transcended the notion of copyeditor. We often wondered how she could
possibly know so much, and thanked the heavens for having her and (less officially)
her classicist husband, Leofranc Holford-Strevens, on our project.