Ambassador and the Courtesan

Paola de Santo is Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Georgia in Athens. De Santo’s research focuses on early modern Italy, with a particular interest in women writers. Together with Caterina Mongiat Farina, she is editor and translator of Isabella Andreini’s Letters (1607) for the Other Voice in Early Modern Europe Series, and editor of an Italian-language critical edition of Andreini’s Lettere.

• Acknowledgments ixIntroduction: The Politics of Dual Identity 11 From Mind to Body: Formation and Narration of the Early Modern Ambassador 162 Ambassadors in "Utopia" 523 Tasso's Messengers: Ambassadors and Poets 824 Armida's Mission: Reconciling Body and Language 1125 Controlling Her Corpus: The Courtesan as Political Writer 144Notes 179Bibliography 217Index 000

"Paola de Santo’s The Ambassador and the Courtesan pairs two seemingly disparate figures whose roles expanded during early modernity in complementary, overlapping, and even hybrid ways. A broad-reaching contribution spanning historical, literary, and visual case studies, this volume offers a fresh look at the metaphor of the body politic as navigated by men and women who held a special, but inevitably complex, relationship to power structures, including through forms of opportunity but also instrumentalization, violability, erasure, and estrangement. While grounded in the Italian context, this volume will also be of interest to readers and scholars of early modern Europe more broadly." - Jessica Goethals, author of Margherita Costa, Diva of the Baroque Court (2023)"Drawing on philology, gender theory, and material culture studies, De Santo expertly surveys a rich variety of written and visual sources in search for their bodies—worshipped, exploited, or dismembered by others and protected, disguised, or sensually revealed by garments. Her insightful study uncovers original and significant connections between diplomacy, seduction, power, and identity formation in early-modern Italy. [. . .] This sophisticated yet eminently readable volume, with its original and lively translations and illuminating notes, will serve both scholars and students of early-modern European literature, political science, history, material culture, and gender studies." - Caterina Mongiat Farina, author of Questione di lingua. L'ideologia del dibattito sull'italiano nel Cinquecento (2014)