Although throughout history women had been confined to enclosed spaces, the advent of courtly life and culture required that men and women would share and interact in public arenas like the princely courts, intellectual salons, or gambling houses. But also in all of these public spaces behavioral rules and regulations aimed to control women’s body by equating honesty with chastity. In this monograph I analyze how in the XVI, XVII, and XVIII centuries women in general, and in particular prostitutes and courtesans, repeatedly challenged those rules in the attempt to affirm their individual freedom. I call this behavior «social amphibology », as just like amphibians these women were able to cross class boundaries and thrive in different social environments. My analysis has three complementary approaches. First, an historical approach where census documents and sumptuary laws are investigated in order to describe the ways in which the political establishment unsuccessfully attempts to enforce its rules over women’s behavior. Second, a literary approach where works by Castigione, Aretino, Bandello, and Veronica Franco are analyzed in order to emphasize the terminological proximity between the legal and the literary languages, and the evolution of the term «courtesan» with its attribute «honest». A third – visual – approach looks at prints of women’s clothing, made by XVI and XVII century artists.The iconographic similarity of all of the images requires a set of rubrics or labels, as a way to control such visual amphibology. In the last segment of this monograph I apply a diachronic perspective to these visual representations as I show how contemporary art historians use the same means of categorization, used in previous centuries, to identify – without any definite proof – paintings and prints included in two recent art exhibitions.

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 sophisticated 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. "A book . . . pleasurably redolent of Venice in the 16th-century. 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 Supplement The Honest Courtesan is the basis for the film Dangerous Beauty (1998) directed by Marshall Herskovitz. (The film was re-titled The Honest Courtesan for release in the UK and Europe in 1999.)

HMSBA is Harvey Miller Studies in Baroque Art.

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A tour de force of scholarship and book production: an essential reference for anyone interested in costume history, Renaissance studies, theater, and ethnography.

This book examines the vre of Anna Maria Ortese (1914-1998) from her first literary writings in the Thirties to her great novels in the Nineties. The analysis focusses on two interweaving core themes, loss and the Other. It begins with the shaping of personal loss of an Other following death, separation, abandonment, coupled with melancholy for life's transience as depicted in autobiographical works and in her masterpiece Il porto di Toledo. The book then addresses Ortese's literary engagement with social themes in realist stories set in post-war Naples in her collection Il mare non bagna Napoli and then explores her continuing preoccupation with socio-ethical issues, imbued with autobiographical elements, in non-realist texts, including her masterful novels L'Iguana, Il cardillo addolorato and Alonso e i visionari The book combines theme and genre analysis, highlighting Ortese's adoption and hybridization of diverse literary forms such as poetry, the novel, the short story, the essay, autobiography, realism, fairy tales, fantasy, allegory. In her work Ortese weaves an ongoing dialogue with literary and non-literary works, through direct quotations, allusions, echoes, adoption of motifs and topoi. The book thus highlights the intertextual relationship with her sources: Leopardi, Dante, Petrarch, Manzoni, Collodi, Montale, Serao; Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Blake, Joyce, Conrad, Melville, Poe, Hawthorne, Hardy; Manrique, Gongora, de Quevedo, Villalón, Bello, Cantar del mio Cid; Heine, Valery, Puccini's Madam Butterfly, folklore, popular songs, and the Bible. Ortese thus shapes her literary themes in the background of social, political and economic upheavals over six decades of Italian history, culminating in an allegorical critique of modernity and a call for a renewed bond between humans and the Other.