Table Of ContentTHE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, CHICAGO 60637
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, LTD., LONDON
© 1992 by The University of Chicago.
All rights reserved. Published 1992.
Printed in the United States of America
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 10 11 12 13 14
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-72812-4 (paper)
ISBN-10: 0-226-72812-9 (paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-02749-4 (e-book)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rosenthal, Margaret F.
The honest courtesan : Veronica Franco, citizen and writer in
sixteenth-century Venice / Margaret F. Rosenthal.
p. cm. — (Women in culture and society)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-226-72812-9 (pbk.)
1. Franco, Veronica, 1546–1591. 2. Venice (Italy)—Intellectual life.
3. Courtesans—Italy—Biography. 4. Authors, Italian—16th century—
Biography. I. Title. II. Series.
DC678.24.F73R67 1992
945′.3107’092—dc20 92-14540
[B] CIP
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of the American National Standard for Information
Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI
Z39.48-1992.
THE HONEST
COURTESAN
VERONICA FRANCO
CITIZEN AND WRITER IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY
VENICE
Margaret F. Rosenthal
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Chicago & London
W C S
OMEN IN ULTURE AND OCIETY
A Series Edited by Catharine R. Stimpson
Contents
F by Catharine R. Stimpson
OREWORD
A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
I
NTRODUCTION
1. S C F E
ATIRIZING THE OURTESAN: RANCO’S NEMIES
2. F H C F
ASHIONING THE ONEST OURTESAN: RANCO’S
P
ATRONS
Appendix: Two Testaments and a Tax Report
3. A V F F L
DDRESSING ENICE: RANCO’S AMILIAR ETTERS
4. D C F I
ENOUNCING THE OURTESAN: RANCO’S NQUISITION
T P D
RIAL AND OETIC EBATE
Appendix: Documents of the Inquisition
5. T C E A E F
HE OURTESAN IN XILE: N LEGIAC UTURE
N
OTES
W C
ORKS ITED
I
NDEX
I
LLUSTRATIONS
Foreword
An extraordinary woman, Veronica Franco was born
in 1546 in Venice. Because they were citizens of
Venice by birth, members of her family had a secure
legal identity. They were, however, neither rich nor
powerful. Indeed, Franco’s mother was a penurious
courtesan. Following a tradition among economically
vulnerable Venetian mothers and daughters, Franco,
too, became a courtesan. She made a success of
her profession: visiting Venice, a future king of
France called on her. Veronica was also a brilliant
woman whose gifts compelled her to develop them.
She educated herself and then invented herself as a
literary figure. Here, too, she succeeded. Between
1570 and 1580, she wrote poetry and public letters.
She took on editorial projects. Tintoretto, the
Venetian painter, did her portrait. Regrettably, when
she died in 1591, much of the wealth she had earned
was gone, a lot of it apparently stolen. Yet, Franco’s
life, on balance, was a dramatic narrative of the
exercise of will and talent.
Now Tita Rosenthal has written The Honest
Courtesan, the first major study of Veronica Franco in
English. Massive and meticulous, the result of both
scrupulous archival research and elegant textual
readings, The Honest Courtesan places Franco in
the culture and society of Venice, the native city that
she left perhaps twice, once to embark upon a
pilgrimage to Rome, once to go into exile because of
a shattered relationship. Within Venice, alluring,
exciting, and beautiful though it was, Franco had to
manage—with skill, imagination, and energy—her
own life, children and family, and profound cultural
tensions concerning sex and gender.
In brief, although female figures dominated the
city’s public iconography, few women could actually
enter into the city’s public discourse. Fortunately for
Franco, Venice, the center of European publishing,
provided as many opportunities for writers of both
genders as any city might have. Moreover, Venetian
iconography adapted and burnished a common
Western polarity in the representation of women, the
polarity between angel and witch, virgin and whore,
Virgin Mary and Eve, or, in Venice’s self-presentation,
between an immaculate, pure, virtuous city and a
luxury loving, bejewelled, voluptuous one. In part to
ensure the purity of its women, especially the wives
and daughters of the elite, Venice regulated them
strenuously. Their space was to be private, not
public. Because “good women” were so restricted,
“bad women” had this social role of playmate and
source of sexual release. As Rosenthal notes, the
Venetian courtesan, like the Japanese geisha, was
expected to provide cultivated company and good
conversation as well. However, during periods of
grave social and economic danger, such as mid-
1570s when the plague infected Venice, the
courtesan and prostitute were conveniently available
as symbols of disorder and vileness.
Franco had her patrons and supporters, especially
Domenico Venier, who conduted an influential salon.
She could not have survived without them. However,
she also seems to have been very much her own
woman, the author of her own self-promotions and
self-justifications. She had two, inseparable tasks: to
defend the courtesan and to take on a public role
forbidden to the conventional woman. The voice that
she created was that of “honest courtesan and
citizen poet” (MS 108). In careful detail, Rosenthal
shows the twists, turns, and rhetorical strategies of
this voice; its parallels to and divergences from that
of the male courtier; and, significantly, its reworking
of the genres and motifs of classical and
Renaissance literature in order to permit a woman’s
voice to flourish. For, Franco—talking with men,
working with men, sleeping with men, giving birth to
three surviving sons—forgot neither women nor the
realities of prostitution. Indeed, two wills leave money
for poor women.
If powerful men helped Franco to survive, powerful
men also opposed and abused her. Some were
fellow writers, among the most vicious a relative of
her patron, Domenico Venier. They projected their
own social, professional, and psychological anxieties
onto women in general, the figure of the
courtesan/prostitute in particular, and, most
particularly, onto Franco herself. Then, in 1580, the
courts of the Inquisition summoned her on charges of
performing heretical incantations, charges that the
male tutor of her children had first filed. The
language of her self-defense when she was on trial
was similar to that of her self-defense against poets
when they attacked her. Once again, she won out,
though at an unquantifiable cost. After the trial, the
charges against her were dropped.
In one of the poems in which Franco confronts a
male poet who is her adversary, she pictures herself
as an Amazon warrior, an image that women writers
have frequently used. She is leading her tribe into
battle. She writes, “When we too are armed and
trained, we can convince men that we have hands,
feet and a heart like yours; and although we may be
delicate and soft, some men who are delicate are
also strong. . . . Women have not yet realized this, for
if they should decide to do so, they would be able to
fight you until death; and to prove that I speak the
truth, amongst so many women, I will be the first to
act, setting an example for them to follow; and on
you who have sinned against them all, I turn with
whichever weapon you may choose, with the wish
and hope of throwing you to the ground” (MS 351).
Strong, clever, bold, cunning, Veronica Franco
refused to be exiled from language and literature.
Because of The Honest Courtesan, we now realize
how grateful we must be for this strength, cleverness,
boldness, and bountiful refusal.
Catharine R. Stimpson
Rutgers University
