Veronica Franco (whose life is featured in the motion picture "Dangerous Beauty") was a sixteenth-century Venetian beauty, poet, and protofeminist. This collection captures the frank eroticism and impressive eloquence that set her apart from the chaste, silent woman prescribed by Renaissance gender ideology.
As an "honored courtesan," Franco made her living by arranging to have sexual relations, for a high fee, with the elite of Venice and the many travelers-merchants, ambassadors, even kings-who passed through the city. Courtesans needed to be beautiful, sophisticated in their dress and...

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...