Overview

Drawing on literature, legal texts, and archival materials, The Ambassador and the Courtesan offers a comparative analysis of these two emerging roles in the early modern period and in Renaissance Italian society. While these two figures may appear unrelated, this book demonstrates their shared relation to the body politic, including the relationship of their very bodies to that metaphorical body. One imagines the early modern ambassador as traveling from one center of power to another, gathering news and disseminating it in writing, as well as negotiating in person. The courtesan, in contrast, is normally imagined employing her body in the service of entertaining elite clients in the enclosed space of the urban salon. These characterizations reinforce their very different roles in Renaissance Italian society and culture, but by placing them in dialogue, salient points of convergence emerge detailing how they were integral to the concurrent emergence of a modern subjectivity of the individual and the formation of the modern state.

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9781644534151

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Reviews

""Paola de Santo’s The Ambassador and the Courtesan pairs two seemingly disparate figures whose roles expanded during early modernity in complementary, overlapping, and even hybrid ways. A broad-reaching contribution spanning historical, literary, and visual case studies, this volume offers a fresh look at the metaphor of the body politic as navigated by men and women who held a special, but inevitably complex, relationship to power structures, including through forms of opportunity but also instrumentalization, violability, erasure, and estrangement. While grounded in the Italian context, this volume will also be of interest to readers and scholars of early modern Europe more broadly."" - Jessica Goethals, author of Margherita Costa, Diva of the Baroque Court (2023) ""Drawing on philology, gender theory, and material culture studies, De Santo expertly surveys a rich variety of written and visual sources in search for their bodies—worshipped, exploited, or dismembered by others and protected, disguised, or sensually revealed by garments. Her insightful study uncovers original and significant connections between diplomacy, seduction, power, and identity formation in early-modern Italy. [. . .] This sophisticated yet eminently readable volume, with its original and lively translations and illuminating notes, will serve both scholars and students of early-modern European literature, political science, history, material culture, and gender studies."" - Caterina Mongiat Farina, author of Questione di lingua. L'ideologia del dibattito sull'italiano nel Cinquecento (2014)

Author Information

Paola de Santo is Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Georgia in Athens. De Santo’s research focuses on early modern Italy, with a particular interest in women writers. Together with Caterina Mongiat Farina, she is editor and translator of Isabella Andreini’s Letters (1607) for the Other Voice in Early Modern Europe Series, and editor of an Italian-language critical edition of Andreini’s Lettere.

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