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Finally finished "The Honest Courtesan" by Margaret F. Rosenthal. Whew! I'm kind of embarrased that it took so long for me to read. All I can say in my defense is 1) I've been busy for the last few months, and 2) It's a thesis. So it reads like...a thesis.
The most interesting sections are the (of course) last two, where Ms. Rosenthal examines the way that Franco wrote poetry in her own defense, first during her trial for heresy, and then socially during her two-year exile from Venice. Veronica used the rhetorical styles of Ovid's Heroides and Amores to turn the image of herself as courtesan from deceitful whore to a woman of honorable and honest fidelity by changing his traditional elegiac verse from a positition of male moral superiority to one centered on the lamenting female voice. It may not sound like much by our current standards, but for a woman to have been able to publish such works during the Renaissance, when a majority of women were being steadily pushed farther and farther away from the seats of intellect and discovery they had been privy to during the Middle Ages, it's a pretty big deal. She wasn't even tried for heresy a second time. :)
Also read: "Lost New York" (2000 ed.) by Nathan Silver. This one's research for the novel. It's full of black and white photos of old New York neighborhoods and buildings that no longer exist, with blurbs about where they were, and how they were lost. The coolest/weirdest thing about it for me was looking at photos of street intersections where I have been, and seeing how different they were 100 or 50 or even 10 years ago. And since the book was published in 2000, it was also a bit bizarre to read his passage about the B-25 Bomber that crashed into the Empire State Building in 1945, which finished with this statement: "It takes the work of aliens using special effects, as in the 1996 film 'Independence Day', to guarantee a complete destruction job."...*shudder*
The most interesting sections are the (of course) last two, where Ms. Rosenthal examines the way that Franco wrote poetry in her own defense, first during her trial for heresy, and then socially during her two-year exile from Venice. Veronica used the rhetorical styles of Ovid's Heroides and Amores to turn the image of herself as courtesan from deceitful whore to a woman of honorable and honest fidelity by changing his traditional elegiac verse from a positition of male moral superiority to one centered on the lamenting female voice. It may not sound like much by our current standards, but for a woman to have been able to publish such works during the Renaissance, when a majority of women were being steadily pushed farther and farther away from the seats of intellect and discovery they had been privy to during the Middle Ages, it's a pretty big deal. She wasn't even tried for heresy a second time. :)
Also read: "Lost New York" (2000 ed.) by Nathan Silver. This one's research for the novel. It's full of black and white photos of old New York neighborhoods and buildings that no longer exist, with blurbs about where they were, and how they were lost. The coolest/weirdest thing about it for me was looking at photos of street intersections where I have been, and seeing how different they were 100 or 50 or even 10 years ago. And since the book was published in 2000, it was also a bit bizarre to read his passage about the B-25 Bomber that crashed into the Empire State Building in 1945, which finished with this statement: "It takes the work of aliens using special effects, as in the 1996 film 'Independence Day', to guarantee a complete destruction job."...*shudder*
