The Honest Courtesan

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. ==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, also released as A Destiny of Her Own in some regions, was re-titled The Honest Courtesan for video release in the United Kingdom and Europe in 1999. ==First edition==

The Honest Courtesan : Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice. Margaret F. Rosenthal. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1992. (hardbound), (paperback)