Episode 178 – Veronica Franco & Courtesans in 16th-Century Venice with Professor Margaret Rosenthal

September 22, 2022 by Natalie

Guest BioMargaret F. Rosenthal is Professor of Italian at the University of Southern California.A specialist in Italian renaissance literature and women’s social history of the Venetian Republic, she has published numerous articles and books on renaissance women writers. The Venetian courtesan poet, Veronica Franco, has been a particular focus of her work. The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer of Sixteenth-Century Venice (University of Chicago Press, 1992) was awarded a national book prize from the Modern Language Association in 1994 and became the basis for both the Warner Brothers’ feature film, Dangerous Beauty, released worldwide in 1998, and Dangerous Beauty, The Musical, which premiered at the Pasadena Playhouse in 2011. She has also co-translated with Ann R. Jones, Poems and Selected Letters of Veronica Franco (University of Chicago Press, 1998), and Clothing of the Renaissance World(Thames and Hudson, 2008), which is a translation from Italian into English of Cesare Vecellio’s hugely influential 1590 costume book documenting the uses of clothing in Europe, Africa, Asia and the New World. Her current book project is a study of the uses of fashion and dress in sixteenth-century illustrated alba amicorum (friendship albums) that were owned by university students throughout Europe.