The Courtesan's Arts Cross-Cultural Perspectives Includes Companion Website

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. In Ming dynasty China and early modern Italy, exchange was made through poetry, speech, and music; inpre-colonial India through magic, music, chemistry, and other arts. Yet like the art of courtesanry itself, those arts have often thrived outside present-day canons and modes of transmission, and have mostly vanished without trace. The Courtesan's Arts delves into this hidden legacy, while touching on its equivocal relationship to geisha. 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 fromdifferent fields. Among cases studied by writers on classics, ethnomusicology, anthropology, and various histories of art, music, literature, and political culture are Ming dynasty China, twentieth-century Korea, Edo and modern Japan, ancient Greece, early modern Italy, and India, past and present.Refusing a universal model, the authors nevertheless share a perception that courtesans hover in the crevices of space, time, and practice--between gifts and money, courts and cities, subtlety and flamboyance, feminine allure and masculine power, as wifely surrogates but keepers of culture. Whatmost binds them to their arts in our post-industrialized world of global services and commodities, they find, is courtesans' fragility, as their cultures, once vital to civilizations founded in leisure and pleasure, are now largely forgotten, transforming courtesans into national icons or historicalcuriosities, or reducing them to prostitution.

Martha Feldman is Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago. She is author of City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (1995) and Opera and Sovereignty: Sentiment, Myth, and Modernity in Eighteenth-Century Italy (2006), and general editor of Critical and Cultural Musicology (2000-2002). Currently she is preparing The Castrato as Myth as the Bloch Lectures at Berkeley. She was named a Getty Scholar in 1998-99 and in 2001 received the Dent Medal from the Royal Musical Association.
Bonnie Gordon is Assistant Professor of Music at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Author of Monteverdi's Unruly Women: The Power of Song in Early Modern Europe (2004), she has published on female voice and contemporary female singer/songwriters. She has received awards from the American Association of University Women, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Mellon Foundation.