A provocative study of the life and times of the West's first female power brokers explains how courtesans used their liaisons with some of the world's most powerful and celebrated men to give themselves an extraordinary influence, wealth, and freedom in a male-dominated world and offers profiles of these remarkable women, including Veronica Franco, Madame de Pompadour, and Marion Davies. Reprint.
An examination of the lives of nineteenth-century Britain's demimonde offers insight into the hierarchies, etiquette, and protocols of the period's courtesans, focusing on five women of particular influence as well as the factors that ...
Not least to Pope Clement VII, who was one of his biggest patrons. As a Medici, Clement came from a noble lineage of the erotic: his uncle, Lorenzo the Magnificent, had written an infamous sonnet extolling the virtues of sodomy within ...
These essays reflect the variety and vitality of the debates engendered by the last three decades of research by confronting the ambiguous terms for prostitution in ancient languages, the difficulty of distinguishing the prostitute from the ...
A gripping art history cold case: the previously untold story of Victorine Meurent, forgotten painter and famous muse to artists from Manet to Toulouse-Lautrec, and the modern search for her lost paintings When former art student and ...
Francis Fleming, The Life and Extraordinary Adventures, the Perils and Critical Escapes, of Timothy Ginnadrake ..., 3 vols (Bath: 1771), vol. 3, p.27. 40 Burford, Wits, Wenchers and Wantons, p.79; See also, Kenneth E. James, ...
The book begins with a brief history of prostitution in Japan and follows with a survey of the Yoshiwara from its origins in the early 1600s to shortly after the Meiji Restoration in 1868.
... she decides to visit the alchemist's rival, Lebreton, who, as “une sorte de pape de l'Étrange” [a sort of pope of the ... After a blood sacrifice during “la Messe Noire” [Black Mass], the guests engage in all sorts of sensual acts ...
When Boston museum curator Piper Chase-Pierpont unearths the steamy memoirs of Regency London's most celebrated courtesan, the Blackbird, she's aroused and challenged by what she finds.
By taking women--and men's relationships with women--seriously, this book makes a case for the centrality of gender relations in the social, political, and intellectual life of the Song and Yuan dynasties.
At once interdisciplinary, empirical, and theoretical, the book is the first to ask how arts have figured in the survival or demise of courtesan cultures by juxtaposing research from different fields.