The Courtesans
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The Book Of The Courtesans
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Author : Susan Griffin
language : en
Publisher: Crown
Release Date : 2002-02-06
The Book Of The Courtesans written by Susan Griffin and has been published by Crown this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2002-02-06 with History categories.
From Pulitzer-Prize-nominated author Susan Griffin comes an unprecedented, provocative look at the dazzling world of the West’s first independent women, whose lively liaisons brought them unspoken influence, wealth, and freedom. While they charmed some of Europe’s most illustrious men honing their social skills as well as their sexual ones, the great courtesans gained riches, power, education, and sexual freedom in a time when other women were denied all of these. From Imperia of sixteenth-century Rome, who personified the Renaissance ideal of beauty; Mme. de Pompadour, the arbiter of all things fashionable in eighteenth-century Paris and Versailles; Liane de Pougy, known in France during the Belle Epoque as “Our National Courtesan”; to Sarah Bernhardt, who, following in her mother’s footsteps, supported herself in her early career with a second profession, The Book of the Courtesans tells the life stories and intricacies of the lavish lifestyles of these women. Unlike their geisha counterparts, courtesans neither lived in brothels nor bent their wills to suit their suitors. They were strong- willed, autonomous, and plucky. An open secret, their presence can be felt throughout our culture. The muses who enflamed the hearts and imaginations of our most celebrated artists, they were also artists in their own right. They wrote poetry and novels, invented the cancan at the Moulin Rouge, and presented celebrated acts at the Folies Bergères. They helped to influence and shape the sensibility of modern literature, painting, and fashion. When Greek sculptor Praxiteles wanted to depict Venus he used a famous courtesan as a model, as in later centuries Titian, Veronese, Raphael, Giorgione, and Boucher did when they painted goddesses. When Marcel Proust was a young man it was the courtesan Laure Hayman who took him under her wing, introducing him to the right people, and providing inspiration for one of literature’s greatest masterpieces. And they often had considerable political influence too. When King Louis XV needed advice on foreign affairs or appointments of state he turned to Jeanne du Barry as well as Pompadour. In her witty and insightful prose, as Griffin celebrates these alluring and fascinating women, she restores a lost legacy of women’s history. She gives us the stories of these amazing women who, starting from impoverished or unimpressive beginnings, garnered chateaux, fine coaches, fabulous collections of jewelry, and even aristocratic titles along the way. And through a brilliant exploration of their extraordinary abilities, skills, and talents which Griffin playfully categorizes as their virtues "Timing, Beauty, Cheek, Brilliance, Gaiety, Grace, and Charm" her book explains how, while helping themselves, through their often outrageous, always entertaining examples, the great courtesans not only enriched our cultural heritage but helped to liberate women from the social, sexual, and economic strictures that confined them. Intensively researched and beautifully crafted, The Book of the Courtesans delves into scintillating but often hidden worlds, telling stories gleaned from many sources, including courtesans’ memoirs, presented along with stunning rare photographs to create memorable portraits of some of the most pivotal figures in women’s history.
The Courtesan S Revenge
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Author : Frances Wilson
language : en
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Release Date : 2014-04-17
The Courtesan S Revenge written by Frances Wilson and has been published by Faber & Faber this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2014-04-17 with History categories.
Harriette Wilson was the most desired and the most dangerous woman in Regency London. This highly acclaimed biography reveals for the first time the true story behind her sensational life and scandalous 'Memoirs'. When her former lovers - including much of the British aristocracy - turned against her, she knew exactly how to take revenge . . . 'A wonderful book. Much more than a biography of one attractive, witty woman, it offers a deft analysis of how Britain dealt with celebrity, sex, power and popular journalism in an age that bears remarkable similarities to our own . . . Frances Wilson is not only a first-rate scholar but also a wonderful storyteller who manages to get inside her namesake's famously creamy skin and tell her story with wit and understanding.' Kathryn Hughes, Mail on Sunday 'Lively and stylish . . . Reveals how dangerous the courtesan who operated at the heart of the political world was thought to be.' Anne Sebba, Spectator 'Harriette's story is deftly and stylishly told. It beats most novels with its rich ingredients.' Frances Spalding, Daily Mail
The Courtesan S Arts
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Author : Martha Feldman
language : en
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Release Date : 2006-03-23
The Courtesan S Arts written by Martha Feldman and has been published by Oxford University Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2006-03-23 with Social Science categories.
Courtesans, hetaeras, tawaif-s, ji-s--these women have exchanged artistic graces, elevated conversation, and sexual favors with male patrons throughout history and around the world. Of a different world than common prostitutes, courtesans deal in artistic and intellectual pleasures in ways that are wholly interdependent with their commerce in sex. In pre-colonial India, courtesans cultivated a wide variety of artistic skills, including magic, music, and chemistry. In Ming dynasty China, courtesans communicated with their patrons through poetry and music. Yet because these cultural practices have existed primarily outside our present-day canons of art and have often occurred through oral transmission, courtesans' arts have vanished almost without trace. The Courtesan's Arts delves into this hidden legacy, unveiling the artistic practices and cultural production of courtesan cultures with a sideways glance at the partly-related geisha. Balancing theoretical and empirical research, this interdisciplinary collection is the first of its kind to explore courtesan cultures through diverse case studies--the Edo period and modern Japan, 20th-century Korea, Ming dynasty China, ancient Greece, early modern Italy, and India, past and present. Each essay puts forward new perspectives on how the arts have figured in the courtesan's survival or demise. Though performative and often flamboyant, courtesans have been enigmatic and elusive to their beholders--including scholars. They have shaped cultures through art, yet their arts, often intangible, have all but faded from view. Often courtesans have hovered in the crevices of space, time, and practice--between gifts and money, courts and cities, feminine allure and masculine power, as substitutes for wives but keepers of culture. Reproductively irrelevant, they have tended to be ambiguous figures, thriving on social distinction while operating outside official familial relations. They have symbolized desirability and sophistication yet often been reviled as decadent. The Courtesan's Arts shows that while courtesans cultures have appeared regularly in various times and places, they are universal neither as a phenomenon nor as a type. To the contrary, when they do crop up, wide variations exist. What binds together courtesans and their arts in the present-day post-industrialized world of global services and commodities is their fragility. Once vital to cultures of leisure and pleasure, courtesans are now largely forgotten, transformed into national icons or historical curiosities, or reduced to prostitution.
The Courtesan S Daughter
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Author : Priscilla Galloway
language : en
Publisher: Laurel Leaf
Release Date : 2004-08
The Courtesan S Daughter written by Priscilla Galloway and has been published by Laurel Leaf this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2004-08 with Fiction categories.
Phano is almost 15, the traditional age for a woman to marry in ancient Athens. She is in love with Theo, who is 30-the traditional age for a man to marry. But marriage may not be an option for her. Her stepmother's enemy, Phrynion, claims that Phano is not really a free woman but a slave who belongs to him, and he is ready to sell her if he can get his hands on her. Phano, her father, and her stepmother must use every resource they have to try to restore her reputation and keep her safe. Even if they can keep Phrynion away, Phano may never be able to marry Theo, whose prominent family would expect a wealthy bride who would bring a good-sized dowry with her. Meanwhile, Athens faces the threat of war from Philip of Macedon. Once she turns 15, Phano must find her place as an adult in the turbulent society of ancient Greece. "From the Hardcover edition."
Lives Of The Courtesans
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Author : Lynne Lawner
language : en
Publisher: Rizzoli International Publications
Release Date : 1987
Lives Of The Courtesans written by Lynne Lawner and has been published by Rizzoli International Publications this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 1987 with Art categories.
The Courtesan S Daughter
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Author : Claudia Dain
language : en
Publisher: Penguin
Release Date : 2007-10-02
The Courtesan S Daughter written by Claudia Dain and has been published by Penguin this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2007-10-02 with Fiction categories.
First in a sexy new series featuring a match-making courtesan. Lady Sophia Dalby, everyone?s favorite courtesanturned- countess, faces her toughest match-making case yet: her own obstinate daughter.
The Mimes Of The Courtesans
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Author : Lucian
language : en
Publisher: BEYOND BOOKS HUB
Release Date : 2021-01-01
The Mimes Of The Courtesans written by Lucian and has been published by BEYOND BOOKS HUB this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2021-01-01 with Fiction categories.
‘The Mimes of the Courtesans’ features a series of dialogues between two courtesans or a courtesan and another, discussing love and sex and the relationship between lovers. Living at the height of the Roman Empire, Lucian wrote these short dialogues of working girls competing for clients, dishing gossip and candid tips of the trade, men trying to keep their girls' attention with expensive gifts. It also portrays the dark side of the hetaera's life: out-of-control parties, blowhard men, and putting up with rough treatment by clients. This translation was published during the 1920s. The identity of the translator is only known by the initials 'A.L.H.' on the Translator's Foreword page.
The Courtesans
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Author : Joanna Richardson
language : en
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Release Date : 2000
The Courtesans written by Joanna Richardson and has been published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2000 with History categories.
In Second Empire Paris there were a dozen courtesans who were generally known as la garde: they were the queens of their profession, the women whom visiting princes thought it essential to see. They were the women who encrusted their bathroom taps with jewels, built palaces in the Champs-Elysées, fought duels in the Bois de Boulogne. They scandalised society and influenced the Press and politics. They also ensnared the husbands and lovers of the most beautiful women in Paris. Joanna Richardson presents her own version of la garde ¿ twelve of the most distinguished courtesans in Paris during their golden age. From the calculating Cora Pearl to the hideous la Païva, who rose from the Moscow ghetto to indecent wealth and fame, and the admirable Madame Sabatier made famous by Baudelaire, to La Castiglione sent by Cavour to seduce Napoleon III, la garde people these pages with all the colour, intrigue, scandal and vivacity with which they peopled the demi-monde of 19th century Paris.
Shakespeare Among The Courtesans
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Author : Duncan Salkeld
language : en
Publisher: Routledge
Release Date : 2016-04-01
Shakespeare Among The Courtesans written by Duncan Salkeld and has been published by Routledge this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2016-04-01 with Literary Criticism categories.
Courtesans - women who achieve wealth, status, or power through sexual transgression - have played both a central and contradictory role in literature: they have been admired, celebrated, feared, and vilified. This study of the courtesan in Renaissance English drama focuses not only on the moral ambivalence of these women, but with special attention to Anglo-Italian relations, illuminates little known aspects of their lives. It traces the courtesan from a wry comedic character in the plays of Terence and Plautus to its literary exhaustion in the seventeenth-century dramatic works of Dekker, Marston, Webster, Middleton, Shirley and Brome. The author focuses especially on the presentation of the courtesan in the sixteenth century - dramas by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Lyly view the courtesan as a symbol of social disease and decay, transforming classical conventions into English prejudices. Renaissance Anglo-Italian cultural and sexual relations are also investigated through comparisons of travel narratives, original source materials, and analysis of Aretino's representations of celebrated Italian courtesans. Amid these fascinating tales of aspiration, desire and despair lingers the intriguing question of who was the 'dark lady' of Shakespeare's sonnets.
Queen Of The Courtesans
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Author : Barbara White
language : en
Publisher: The History Press
Release Date : 2014-06-02
Queen Of The Courtesans written by Barbara White and has been published by The History Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2014-06-02 with Biography & Autobiography categories.
Fanny Murray was an incomparable Georgian beauty and the most desired courtesan of the 1750s. The daughter of an impoverished musician from Bath, she took London society by storm, not only as the most prized 'purchaseable beauty' of her day, but also as a fashion icon and muse to poets, writers and artists. She counted princes, aristocrats and politicians among her friends and lovers, but relished the company of rogues, fraudsters and ne'er-do-wells. Barbara White presents evidence to suggest that Fanny Murray participated spiritedly in the sexual antics of the notorious 'Monks of Medmenham', the most infamous of the Hell-fire Clubs. After she retired from prostitution, Fanny Murray reinvented herself, entering a pragmatic marriage with the Scottish actor David Ross. Surprisingly, her virtues as a devoted and faithful wife became almost proverbial. Even so, Murray could not escape her disreputable past. In 1763, a scurrilous poem dedicated to her caused a national scandal that ended in the infamous trial of the radical politician John Wilkes for obscene libel. Barbara White's portrait of Fanny Murray takes readers from the brothels of Covent Garden to sex romps at Medmenham Abbey, from refined drawing rooms in London to marital respectability in Edinburgh. This is an illuminating contribution to the scholarly understanding and popular appreciation of a complex and intriguing period of British history. Fanny Murray's triumph – against almost insuperable odds – is a remarkable story, as rich in the telling as it is enthralling.