The Courtesan's Arts Luis Berrueco (fl. 1727-1749), Encounter with Four Women. Municipal Hospital (Ex-Convent of San Juan de Dios), Atlixco, Puebla, Mexico. Courtesy of the Honorable Town Council of Atlixco. Berrueco's aurally evocative painting depicts St. John of God in a sumptuous bedchamber beseeching four courtesans to leave their profession. The asceticism of the sixteenth-century Portuguese saint, who kneels on the floor wearing only a brown cloak and clutching rosary beads, contrasts sharply with the luxury of the courtesans, whose trappings include clothing made of colorful fabric, pearl bracelets and other jewelry, mirrors, beauty spots, a carpet, and a dressing screen. As a negrita servant watches in exasperation, the saint's chanted prayers seem to interrupt a session of music-making in which the courtesans had been playing the Spanish harp and guitar, probably as accompaniment to singing. Ironically, the saint's state of undress, coupled with the particularly luxuriant bed, alludes to the sexual basis of courtesanry while his asceticism highlights the courtesans' acquisition of the art objects and wealth. Following Novohispanic custom, a caption in the corner uses rhyming verse to explain the scenario. The Courtesan's Arts Cross-Cultural Perspectives Edited by Martha Feldman and Bonnie Gordon OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 2OO6 OXPORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2006 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The courtesan's arts : cross-cultural perspectives / edited by Martha Feldman and Bonnie Gordon. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-517028-3; 978-0-19-517029-0 (pbk.) i. Courtesans—History—Cross-cultural studies. I. Feldman, Martha. II. Gordon, Bonnie, 1968- HQui.C682oo6 3o6.74'2!o862i—dc22 2005047340 4 6 8 9 7 53 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper For Emily and Rebecca and Rebecca and Jonathan This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments tThis book realizes a dream of many years' standing. We have first to thank the Women's Board of the University of Chicago for making it possible. They gave their most generous support to the project at the conference stage and again at the publication stage. Without their help we could never have done this book in style. Our heartfelt thanks are owed to all of them, as well as to Gretel Braidwood, of De- velopment at the University of Chicago. We have many others to thank for support in kind. The State University of New York at Stony Brook contributed crucial collaborative support toward making the CD insert, as did the Music Department of the University of Chicago. Critical funding toward the conference that brought together the authors included in this volume was provided by the Roger Weiss and Howard Mayer Brown fund of the Department of Music at the University of Chicago, along with funding from the Adelyn Russell Bo- gert Fund of the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Committee on South Asian Studies, the Dean of the Humanities, and the Newberry Library Consortium Com- mittee, all of the University of Chicago. Our special thanks to Thomas Christensen and Robert L. Kendrick, past and present chairs, respectively, of the Department of Music at the University of Chicago, as well as the Dean Emeritus of the Humanities Division, Janel Mueller, and the Chair of the Music Department at SUNY Stony Brook, Jody Lochhead. Martha Feldman's work on the volume was partially supported by a grant for University Teachers from the National Endowment for the Humanities and from the Humanities Division of the University of Chicago, and Bonnie Gordon's likewise by the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe University. Our editorial assistants helped shorten the making of this book. Martha Feldman's Research Assistant Drew Edward Davies worked with great intelligence through all the early and middle editorial stages of this volume. Cordelia Chenault, Bonnie Gordon's Research Assistant at Stony Brook, lent invaluable assistance on the CD and illustrations. Additional thanks go to Deborah Heckert, who worked with Bon- nie on earlier editorial stages, and especially to Shawn Marie Keener, who worked viii Acknowledgments tirelessly with Martha at the conference stage, wrote a wonderful program essay for the concert of the Newberry Consort, created our website, and stepped in again with great energy and intelligence at the stages of manuscript submission and copyediting. Meredith Ray, our Program Assistant for the conference and now Assistant Professor of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Delaware, was our ace in the hole throughout all the critical phases of conference planning and execution. Special thanks are due to the Newberry Consort for its superlative work in con- suiting with Martha Feldman and her seminar, putting together a beautiful concert on April 5, 2002 for the conference, giving permission to include performances on the CD included here, and recording other examples separately on short notice. In particular we want to thank the Consort's Director and gambist, Mary Springfels, soprano Ellen Hargis, and violinist David Douglas, as well as harpsichordist David Schrader, lutenist John Lenti, and gambists Craig Trompeter and Ken Perlow. Past managers of the Consort, Fred Liese and Alex Bonus, were helpful through many stages of this project, and most especially has been the present Manager Ken Perlow, who oversaw arrangements for a recent recording of examples for the CD. Our most vigorous thanks to the brilliant grand master of kathak dance, Pandit Chitresh Das, Artistic Director of the Chitresh Das Dance Company, and his prin- cipal dancer Jaiwanti Pamnani, for a stunning performance-demonstration of kathak dance on April 6, 2002. We give special thanks also to Andrew Natoli for his skilled mastering of the CD. Kelly Foreman helped immensely with locating audio examples, and Miki Keneda, Miho Matsugu, and Janis Mimura helped with various translation issues. The Law Office of Linda Mensch, P.C., as well as Norm Hirschy, Editorial Assistant for Music at Oxford University Press, helped greatly with obtaining permissions for the CD examples. Carla Zecher of the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library was a linchpin in staging the conference that led to this volume. We wish to thank her most particularly as well as the staff of her Center. We are extremely grateful to those who read the manuscript or portions of it at various stages. Especially encouraging were the initial readers for Oxford University Press, Jane A. Bernstein and an anonymous reader. Judith T. Zeitlin consulted with us repeatedly at all stages in developing the project, which included critical advice on assembling the participants and commenting on the Introduction. Norma Field and Christopher A. Faraone consulted with us often about possible contributors and intellectual directions. Dorothy Ko also consulted with us during the earlier stages of the project. Also invaluable was the extensive reading and advice of our partners, Patricia Barber and Manuel Lerdau. We also thank Patricia for bringing her expertise as a producer and recording artist to our editing of the CD insert. Martha Feldman wishes to thank all of the members of her research seminar on "The Courtesan's Voice in Early Modern Italy," including Lyndal Andrews, Drew Edward Davies, Dawn De Rycke, Justin Flosi, Shawn Marie Keener, and Courtney Quaintance. Keener's fine essay, "Virtue, Illusion, Venezianita: Vocal Bravura and the Early Cortigiana Onesta," was sought out by another volume, now published, Musi- cal Voices of Early Modern Women: Many-Headed Melodies, ed. Thomasin K. LaMay (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). Acknowledgments ix We owe additional thanks to session chairs Kyeong-Hee Choi, Assistant Profes- sor, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, the University of Chicago; Joan Erd- man, anthropologist and performing arts scholar at Columbia College and Research Associate in the Committee on South Asian Studies at the University of Chicago; James M. Redfield, Professor of Classics; and Elissa Weaver, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, both of the University of Chicago. Robert Kendrick and Chika Kinoshita contributed fine papers for the conference but were not able to contribute to the volume. The administrator of the Music Department at the University of Chicago, Kathy Holmes, provided tireless administrative and budgetary support. Our thanks to her for always making the impossible possible, with sweetness and humor. The musical examples were expertly prepared by Drew Edward Davies and the index equally so by Melissa Reilly. Many people traveled long distances to attend the conference as auditors, among them Mary C. Dalton, Kelly Foreman, Eugenic Giusti, and Sheila Schonbrun. We were moved by their special efforts and commitment. Finally, our warmest thanks to Kim Robinson, Music Editor at Oxford Univer- sity Press, New York, at the time we contracted this book, who believed in it from the beginning, and her expert Editorial Assistants, Eve Bachrach and later Norm Hirschy, as well as other members of the Oxford team, including Bob Milks, Senior Production Editor, and Suzanne Ryan, the new Music Editor. It is impossible to ex- press enough our gratitude to Bonnie Blackburn, who embraced this project com- pletely and transcended the notion of copyeditor. We often wondered how she could possibly know so much, and thanked the heavens for having her and (less officially) her classicist husband, Leofranc Holford-Strevens, on our project.