The Honest Courtesan
The Honest Courtesan is a 1992 biographical book by Margaret Rosenthal about a 16th century Venetian courtesan named Veronica Franco.
[edit] Description
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.
[edit] Adaptation
In 1998, the film Dangerous Beauty was based on this book. The movie starred Catherine McCormack as Veronica Franco and was directed by Marshall Herskovitz. The film was re-titled The Honest Courtesan for release in the United Kingdom and Europe in 1999.
[edit] First edition
The honest courtesan : Veronica Franco, citizen and writer in sixteenth-century Venice. Margaret F. Rosenthal. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1992. ISBN 0-226-72811-0 (hardbound), ISBN 0-226-72812-9 (paperback)
