It is not holiness, but arrogance displayed
to take away the greatest gift—free will—
bestowed by God from the beginning of time. – Tullia d’Aragona, Sonnet XXXV
The existence of courtesans is a glaring refutation of neofeminist dogma about objectification, the eternal victimhood of whores, etc; the fact that the most celebrated, successful and highly-paid harlots of all time were often those who were educated and could match or surpass men in intellectual pursuits throws a huge spanner into the catechism that prostitution is a manifestation of male dominance over women, that our clients hate us, and so on. Whenever possible, neofeminist historians deny that courtesans were prostitutes, pretend that accomplished women were not really courtesans, or describe them with circumlocutions like, “she chose to cohabit with several men who supported her financially.” And when all else fails, they simply ignore them. Fortunately neither male historians nor female ones with less parochial views feel the need to dissemble about such women, and among them Tullia d’Aragona is rightfully viewed as worthy of respect and study.
She was born in Rome sometime between 1508 and 1510 to the courtesan Giulia Ferrarese, who was considered the most beautiful woman of her time. Giulia was married sometime before that to Costanzo Palmieri d’Aragona, but the marriage seems to have been a family subterfuge to cover up for Costanzo’s wealthier and more important cousin, Cardinal Luigi d’Aragona (who was the illegitimate grandson of Ferdinand I, King of Naples); since cardinals of the Catholic Church were not supposed to hire hookers, his poorer cousin’s marriage of convenience to his favorite lady gave him excuses to be at their house often. Tullia believed herself to be the cardinal’s daughter and he apparently agreed, because he paid for her education and when he died suddenly in 1519 the family immediately relocated to Sienna (though the exact reason for this is unknown). She was a brilliant girl, and over the next few years her mother trained her to be a courtesan; in Renaissance Italy it was a trade often passed from mother to daughter, with the mother taking over as guardian, housekeeper and advisor once the daughter was old enough to start working (generally in her late teens).
Tullia’s career began when she and her mother returned to Rome in 1526, but unlike most courtesans of her time she preferred to “tour” rather than staying in one place; obviously her stays were much longer than those of modern escorts, but very much shorter than was typical in those less-mobile times. She is known to have resided for periods in Venice (1528 and 1540), Bologna (1529), Florence (1531), Adria (1535), Ferrara (1537), and Siena (1543 and 1545), and when she wasn’t anywhere else she was in Rome. She was able to do this because, though she lacked her mother’s legendary beauty, she had a reputation for intelligence, learning and wit which started literally in childhood, and which had spread throughout northern Italy. Though she had her share of clients who were nobles, bankers and the like, she was always most popular among the cognoscenti, especially poets and philosophers; she held salons at her residences from at least 1537 on, and her clients and guests encouraged her literary development and helped to popularize her work. Chief among these was Girolamo Muzio of Ferrara, a courtier who acted as her editor. Because mind and personality inspire men more than mere beauty (and probably in part because so many of her clients were poets), Tullia’s following was extremely devoted even by a great courtesan’s standards; Emilio Orsini founded a “Tullia Society” of six clients sworn to defend her honor, several men were supposed to have committed suicide for love of her, Filippo Strozzi was recalled from his diplomatic post for divulging Florentine state secrets to her, and Ercole Bentivoglio was said to have gone about carving her name on every tree he could find.
The 16th century was a time of great unrest in Italy; what is now one country was then divided into a number of city-states who were often at war with one another. The Pope, several city-states and France were at war with the Holy Roman Empire during Tullia’s first few years in the profession, and this and the growth of Protestantism in Germany had created a climate of fear in northern Italy. Such times always breed conservatism and usually lead to an explosion of authoritarian laws enacted in the name of “safety” and “morality”; just as in our own era, many of those laws were directed against whores. At that time, nobody was deranged enough to believe that prostitution could be stamped out, so most of the laws merely intended to stigmatize and marginalize harlots by forcing them to live in red-light districts and wear certain kinds of clothes to differentiate them from “good” women. In order to get around these laws, Tullia decided to follow in her mother’s footsteps by entering into a marriage of convenience to one Silvestro Guicciardi on January 8th, 1543. We know practically nothing about this man other than that he died young and one of Tullia’s few enemies accused her of complicity in the death; the whole purpose of the arrangement seems to have been to make her officially a married woman so she could ignore the restrictions on courtesans.
By the end of 1545, the political turmoil was so bad that Tullia returned to Florence and placed herself under the protection of Cosimo I de Medici; there she once again established a salon and entered into correspondence with several poets. But the busybodies just wouldn’t leave her alone; in 1547 she was charged with refusing to wear the harlot clothes demanded by a brand-new law. This time, however, she appealed directly to the Duke and Duchess, and she was granted an exception due to her skill as a poet and philosopher (ah, whorearchy!) Soon afterward she dedicated her new book, Poems of Madam Tullia de Aragona and Several Others, to the Duchess; later that year, she dedicated Dialogue on the Infinity of Love to the Duke. The former was a collection of poems by and about her, many by Florentine nobles and respected literati; the latter was the first neo-Platonic dialogue ever written by a woman.
But despite her comfort and literary success in Florence, she felt drawn back to Rome and returned there in October 1548; she seems to have semi-retired as a courtesan at that point, and devoted her remaining years to writing poetry and to hosting an academy of philosophy in her home. Her son, Celio, was born around this time; like her daughter, Penelope (born 1535), his father is unknown (though some sources erroneously assume it to be her husband, who was already dead). Her last work was an epic poem entitled Il Meschino, altramente detto il Guerrino (The Unfortunate, also called Guerrino), a poetic version of the 14th-century prose tale of a nobleman who is captured by pirates as a baby, sold into slavery, escapes and then wanders the world (even venturing into Hell) in search of his parents. Despite the fact that this is the earliest known epic poem by a woman and that it touches on many strikingly modern philosophical subjects (including gender identity, homosexuality and “otherness”), it has never been translated into English. She died of unknown causes in 1556, and Il Meschino was published posthumously four years later.
Even in a staunchly patriarchal country and era, the genius of Tullia d’Aragona was recognized and respected, and her work has been periodically reprinted in Italian (several times since the early 1970s). She was largely unknown in the English-speaking world until quite recently, however; the only English-language reference to her I could find before 1990 was a chapter in Courtesans of the Italian Renaissance from 1976. Given her intellectual accomplishments, one would think that feminists would be at least as eager to call attention to her as they have to far less accomplished and deserving women…but of course those women were not prostitutes. Like the Italians of the 1540s, neofeminists would prefer to stigmatize Tullia and consign her to a ghetto for her unrepentant whoredom rather than to admit that prostitutes are just as capable of intellectual and social contributions as anyone else.
*snort* That’s a good one!
Great biography, Maggie.
That’s a direct quote from the Wikipedia entry on Olympe de Gouges. One just can’t make up anything as silly as others will write with an absolutely straight face.
BTW! I have read some claims that geishas in Japan were not really prostitutes either. Is that also denial?
It’s a denial based in law, and a very mechanistic interpretation of the word “sex”. Compare “money is for time and companionship only”. Dig?
And by “people who know more about the subject than me” I seem to mean Maggie as usual 😉
X were/are not really prostitutes generally means X had/have high-class clients that don’t pay by the act. While geisha were theoretically hired for non-sexual entertainment services, they also tended to find themselves men who financed them rather quickly, and I remember reading that the idea of a virgin geisha would have been considered just as much a paradox as the idea of a virgin wife. There’s probably people in this thread who know more about the subject than me and who can explain this better and with proper citations, but I hope I can at least make things slightly clearer.
I can’t help you – never met a “geisha” … but I DO know that there’s some strange going’s on with Asian hookers. They can do things to make you THINK you’re having sex but you actually aren’t. They have this “slight of hand” thing … or I guess a better way to say it would be “slight of thigh”. It’s hard to discribe. So maybe Geisha’s were the ones that came up with that technique … and it was allowed since it’s technically not “sex” because I think the Japanese have always rationalized that “sex” means specifically a penis in a vagina.
But don’t quote me on any of that! 😛
FOUND IT! SUMATA!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumata
Circumvents Japanese Anti-Prostitution Laws. Those cleaver bastards!!!
Interesting! That’s my new thing learned for the day, and it’s barely noon!
Intercrural sex was practiced in ancient Europe before Geishas emerged in Japan.
Geisha were (and are) not required to have sex with their clients. The closest modern equivalent would be the hostesses in the top end “Hostess Clubs” in parts of Asia, especially Hong Kong, Japan, and the like. Their job is to entertain and to act as a social lubricant. They might have sex with clients when they choose (and for ridiculous fees), but is not a given, no matter how much money or gifts are involved.
Naturally in the old days, a powerful lord or samurai could probably have demanded sex and received it, since he could have asked for a person’s head and got that too.
Brothels in ancient China had equivalent women, who, due to their beauty, intelligence and skill, could specify that they only offered “song” and not “body”. They were often in high demand and sometimes ended up as a concubine or second (third, fourth, etc.) wife of some wealthy man. Many were famous poets and composers.
The Geisha of feudal japan were, in a real sense, the top flight escorts of their day: there were a number of well-established iemoto-ryu which taught various styles of classical practice for instruments, poetry forms, tea ceremony, and etiquette, which a geisha would belong to for her lifetime with that particular style of skill.
The Geisha would entertain clients using these traditional arts, plus her considerable wit, feminine charm and social graces, acting as companion, dinner host, musician, poet, courtesan and almost, but not entirely, mistress.
Much like Maggies class of Escort today, the Geisha were paid for their time and service as entertainer; any “granting of the pillow” (sexuality) was, at least in concept, a matter for the Geisha and the Client and not part of the conceptual hiring arrangement.
Familiar, no?
In the long run, a favourite client – preferred Geisha relationship may evolve, and the Geisha may agree to become his Mistress; this relationship was sometimes viewed as, in all but name, second Wife. The Geisha was, at that point, expected to “hang up the shingle” and the client was expected to keep her in a fiscal sense, in exchange for her exclusivity.
Which might also seem familiar, at the highest end of the Escort profession today.
Anyone with more interest might do well to start with a book titled “Geisha” by Liza Dalby. It gives an insight into the Willow World of 1970 Japan, and some historical information about the Ancient Profession as well. Recommended Reading, on my part.
Betsy Prioleau did a great write-up of Tullia d’Aragona in her book Seductress. One of the best stories that Prioleau tells about Tullia is about her bold rebuke, in church, to a priest who was known for his invectives against pleasure. Lots of great footnotes in that book. La Belle Otero, like Tullia, had several men commit suicide for the love of her.
Tell the truth – you women GET OFF on that don’t you!! 😛
I like to please women and make them happy … but not that much!
Heh…:P
On the one hand, sure, it can be a bit flattering that someone was SO in love with you that they just can’t carry on without you. On the other more frightening hand, holy shit! I’d be seriously freaked out by that.
Special Hooker-Clothing
I suspect most prostitutes doing any kind of out-call, or even in-call work in a private home, would have entered a marriage of convenience during this time-period. Special clothing just does NOT work outside of a brothel setting.
A call girl I know loves thigh high boots but refuses to wear them because they are “too hookerish.”. Even if France Drescher can get away with them on “The Nanny.”
Hope you don’t think I’m being pedantic but Tullia D’ Aragona mother was Giulia Campana ,who was from Ferrara. It was another courtesan, Giulia Farnese, who lived at the same time, known as “Giulia la bella”, who was regarded as the most beautiful woman of her day. I mention it because she was an amazing women in her right. She was the wife of Orsino Orsini but also the mistress to her husband’s cousin Pope Alexander VI, and possibly a lover to the Pope’s son the infamous Cardinal Cesare Borgia as well as his daughter Lucrezia Borgia. She was also the sister of Cardinal Alessandro, who became Pope Paul III. But as well as being a beautiful and well connected, she was famed for her intelligence and proved to be a very capable governess of Carbognano.
I think feminists despise courtesans because to vary degrees they achieved power, success and status, and may, heaven forbid, enjoyed being courtesans. Feminist like their whores to be abused and exploited by men. as an ideology, feminism is little more than a misappropriation of Marxist claptrap retrospectively applied to women’s suffrage. Stripped of it pretensions amounts to clitocracy or lesbian separatism. Feminist started out from the position that females don’t enjoy penetration and therefore can’t enjoy sex with males unless they’ve been emasculated. The problem with that is it’s fundamental untrue: most of us love being penetrated by men.
Not to defend “neofeminist dogma”, but most of the wealthy aristocracy that made up the courtesans’ clientele were a bunch of oppressive crony capitalists.
So successful and high status though they made be, is it really all that surprising that they were given such short shrift by history?
There are lots of famous and infamous courtesans in history, they just don’t happen to be feminist icons. In my opinion, Tullia d’Aragona is obscure precisely because there are so many other more noteworthy courtesans of that period. Also, a lot of their clientele are historically noteworthy because they were murdering, robbing, oppressive bastards, so that’s hardly an obstacle to historical significance.
Famous, yes, but famous mostly because they provided a luxury service to the people whose murdering, robbery and oppression made up most of the history of Renaissance Italy.
Tullia d’Aragona, when confronted by an unjust law created by “busybodies” to oppress women; insisted that she was actually a poet and philosopher.
Not much of a feminist icon.
Except that she actually WAS a poet and a philosopher, asshole. Or didn’t you bother reading that far? 🙁
I think the point asmallnotch is making is that Tullia sought refuge in the law rather than challenged on behalf of the entire sorority of oppressed whores and “womyn” in general, because to have a vagina and do otherwise is to let down the sisterhood and side with the bourgeois patriarchal oppressors! *rolls-eyes*.
A Small Notch is a troll. He’s more subtle and careful than most trolls, but he’s still a member of the species, and I’m finally implementing what I’ve threatened him with before: he’s going back on moderation. He will have to learn to conduct himself like an adult, or he’ll see the number of his posts which actually appear rapidly diminish.
I wasn’t sure. Anyway this is a really interesting post, actually most I enjoy but I love this epoch. I think it very significant how many influential courtesans there were during this period but I do slightly disagree with you. I think it was a reaction to cholera which was widely believed to be a sexually transmitted disease, although not by surgeons, that was the principle cause for the crackdown on whores. The religious fervour predictably followed. The word puttana (whore) is used much more liberally in Italian, same as the word figa (cunt), so it wasn’t just prostitutes who were the target of the legislation, it was all women who were deemed promiscuous. I think it’s noteworthy that prostitution in Italy has only really be heavily regulated during cholera epidemics, as opposed to England where prostitution, public houses (bars), gambling, bear baiting, cock fighting and dog fighting were all prohibited during the interregnum and America was settled by English puritans, who contrary to popular belief weren’t fleeing religious persecution.
That, without the sarcasm, was my point.
Tullia was a gifted poet, that I admit.
Alright, let me “take it from the top” if you wouldn’t mind.
Maggie’s main argument was that courtesans refuted “neofeminist dogma” about whores.
This is true, and why in my first post, I said I wasn’t defending that.
Maggie also criticized the fact that courtesans were not more popular among feminists, in particular Tullia because because of her intellectual gifts.
And I would argue that while accomplished, there are a huge number of female poets and philosophers, which is the main reason why she is obscure.
Feminism, being interested in the history of women’s rights, would be more interested in less successful individuals that had something to do with that area of history.
Of course, Maggie also believes that courtesans were actually the “original feminists”.
That is something that I disagree with, but is somewhat beyond the context of this column.
Yet you didn’t say that feminist give courtesans short shrift you said history. So I’m still not clear whether you’re advocating this feminist-Marxist approach to history or whether your employing Socratic irony (which can also be viewed as trolling)?
I was unclear in my initial post. That is a bad habit of mind where I do far too much of my thinking while doing the actual writing portion.
So to clarify, I meant that courtesans were given short shrift in both general history ( they were famous enough to be mentioned but they didn’t really do anything by themselves) and feminist history (meaning history about women’s rights).
And I am playing the devil’s advocate basically.
But, feminism and marxism have nothing to do with each other, (FYI, libertarianism and socialism are totally compatible) and a number of other commentators on this blog would strongly disagree with your assertion that feminist is just marxism.
What I mean when I use the term feminism, is close to what Maggie means when she mentions feminism in a positive context.
Like, for Maggie, there is neofeminism, which is what you mean when you say feminism. Then, there’s Maggie’s own “archeofeminism” which is where whores are on top of totem pole. (simplification.) Something most of the sex workers on this blog take with a grain of salt. And finally, there’s feminism, which here tends to the form of feminism that is not anti-sex worker right, but doesn’t support the sex worker rights movement.
To argue that feminism, as developed in the 60s and 70s, which is when it was developed as an ideology wasn’t Marxist is to dismiss the most influential feminist works of that period. I realise that in America it’s common to retrospectively apply the label feminist but that is as best anachronistic and at worse re-writing history. I actually think the term archeofeminism is quite good but I prefer the term precursor to feminism. I understand neo-feminism perhaps as post-feminism but that’s not how Maggie uses it. I define myself as anti-feminist in the Italian sense but leaving aside the battleground over labels, I don’t agree with you that courtesans haven’t been influential in their own right. As far as the advancement of women’s rights, I think that can be very subjective. For example, I wouldn’t regard the suffragettes as advancing women’s right, but I take your point.
So what works would those be? And some works being influenced by Marxist thought or written by Marxist thinkers, doesn’t mean that feminism is Marxism.
I must concur that labelling is annoying, though honestly I must say that people are really funny when they try to avoid it. Social movements are complex phenomenon, there’s going to be a ton of different sub-movements that have major differences. I just recently “joined the adult movement” and I swear it’s like everybody just complaints about societies being more complicated than starcraft factions.
But, to expand on my premise about courtesans’ influence on the advancement on women’s rights. It is that courtesans’ wealth, status and influence were “magnanimously ‘granted’ by those in power” and that’s why they were powerless to preserve them. (Dialing back on the “Socratic irony” I see a case for arguing that courtesans were precursors to feminism that were both highly limited in scope and ultimately failed, but should probably be more popular in women’s studies classes.)
As regards to your opinion on suffragettes, could you expand on that reasoning. How, exactly, is demanding and achieving access to significant political power not an advancement of rights?
I suppose that if one considers voting pointless, the accomplishments of suffragettes are pretty meaningless. Sure, women can vote now, but so what?
I don’t know that stefi holds any such position, and I want to say that: she likely doesn’t hold that position. But it’s the explanation which occurred to me first.
[…] From Maggie McNeill’s blog post about Tullia d’Aragona. […]
I always like these historical articles but I never know how to respond to them.
Another harlotography! I look forward to these each month.
Sailor Barsoom, I’m replying to your other comment. What were the accomplishments of suffragettes?
The Representation of the People Act 1918 was passed in the aftermath of the Great War because parliament was worried about a revolution if they continued to deny working class men the vote. So the 1918 general election was the first when working class men were given the vote. The reason parliament was willing to extend the franchise to women over the age of 30, who are either graduated university, owned property or were married to a property owner was to undermine the working class vote.
The NUWSS (Suffragists) led by Millicent Fawcett what the female age reduced to 18 but were happy to support this classicist legislation because they didn’t want to extend the vote to working class girls like my Great-Great Grandmother Fulvia, whose husbands rented the property they lived in.
The WSPU (Suffragettes) led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel Pankhurst, set women’s right back prior to the Great War with their propaganda by deed. Then they wrapped up their suffrage activism in 1914 and never restarted their direct action. Emmeline Pankhurst became a Conservative and anti Bolshevik before her death.
The East London Federation of Suffragette group that refused to call an armistice during the Great War, it was led by Sylvia Pankhurst, who maintained close connections to Lenin. The movement joined the CPGB (communist party of GB) in 1920 and she was expelled in 1921 for dissent. She was the only one genuinely interested in the working class but she was a Marxist-Leninist with no real support.
My Great-Great Grandmother Fulvia and Great-Grandmother Fiorenza didn’t get the vote until the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928. So the first election they were both eligible to vote in was 1929 “Flapper Election”. That means Fulvia was denied the vote 4 times between 1918 and 1929. they both had the right to vote in the 1931 and 1935 elections but there were no election for 10 years because democracy, such that it was, was suspended during the war. It wasn’t until 1950 that one person-one vote was introduced.
So I can’t attribute a single act of Parliament to the Suffragettes. Women’s political emancipation was the result of two world wars and numerous revolutions. The vote was a right given to women by men.
Thank you for answering. I suspected your reason wasn’t the one which occurred to me, but I couldn’t think of what else it might be. Well, now I know.
In the United States also we have the unusual situation that women achieved the right to vote, in spite of the fact that women could not vote on whether or not women should be able to vote. Then again, blacks weren’t able to vote on whether or not blacks should be able to vote, and those under twenty-one years of age but over eighteen weren’t able to vote on whether or not the voting age should be lowered to eighteen.
Did not the Suffragettes help set the stage for the eventual expansion of voting rights?
No!
lol!
Well, that was certainly direct.
I just wrote a response to some of the questions raised in the comments, but I wasn’t logged in and WordPress deleted it. So two points relevant to your points:
In sixteenth-century Italy, “courtesan” was not a euphemism, at least it was a different rank in the hierarchical society that ranked everything. “Honest” meant honored; a cortigiana onesta was one who had education and musical training. An honest courtesan, like a geisha, has more agency but was not completely free at the time. Tullia d’Aragona was the daughter of a courtesan and a cardinal (Luigi d’Aragona was probably her real father and Tagliavia, a sort of fall guy), who Rodrigo Borgia Pope Alessandro VI made a cardinal when he was 22.
It’s true that women writers in general and those who were sex workers in particular get short shrift from historians. NO ONE had done a full English translation of Tullia d’Aragona’s Rime (Poems) until I published one in 2007.
Everyone always talks about these women’s lives instead of letting them speak.
But if you are interested in this fiercely independent woman with a steel-trap mind, read Tullia’s poems, in English, with a a bit of history about courtesans, Church hypocrisy, etc. It is not an academic book. But if you would like to read what Tullia has to say for herself, by herself, get yourself a copy of the book!
https://www.amazon.com/Sweet-Fire-dAragonas-Dialogue-Selected/dp/0807615625
I am flattered that Maggie’s post begins with a quotation from poem XV (to Bernardino Ochino,radical Reform preacher). It is published in Sweet Fire: Tullia d’Aragona’s Poetry of Dialogue and Selected Prose ed. and trans. Elizabeth A. Pallitto (New York: Braziller, 2007).
Thank you for your support of women poets, translators, and authors.