Settling the Debt: Veronica Franco’s Literary Economics

Meredith Kennedy Ray

University of Chicago

With the publication of her Lettere familiari a diversi in 1580, the Venetian writer and courtesan Veronica Franco—as controversial in sixteenth-century Venice for one profession as for the other—located herself within a commercial as well as literary trend. Franco, who had been introduced to the courtesan’s life by her mother Paola, had by this time been married and separated, raised several children, and gone on to considerable success in each of her professions. Her patrons were powerful, and she moved in the influential literary circle of Domenico Venier. The relative power Franco had accrued through her relationships with prominent members of Venetian society, as well as her literary ambitions, elicited the admiration of her contemporaries, but in many cases also aroused their hostility. Franco was ridiculed in verse by her enemies, and in 1580—the year in which her letters appeared—Ridolfo Vannitelli, the tutor of one of Franco’s sons, accused her of performing magical incantations.^[1] Although Franco was never formally tried, transcripts of the Inquisition’s preliminary examination suggest that Vannitelli was motivated by a personal resentment. Not only did he denounce Franco as a “fattucchiera puttana pubblica” who never attended mass, but he seemed to feel threatened by the position Franco had achieved through her carefully chosen friendships, and complained “. . . ha ella troppo grande aiuto in questa città, et è favorita da molti, dai quali vorrebbe esser odiata.”^[2] However, despite her escape from the Inquisition, Franco’s luck would soon change for the worse, perhaps to the satisfaction of ill-wishers like Vannitelli. After a ten-year period characterized by economic comfort, literary production, and a certain social prestige, she would find herself struggling to survive on a meager annual income. When she died on July 22, 1591, following a month of illness, Franco was only forty-five.

In 1580, however, Franco already had a volume of poetry to her credit, published five years earlier, and was ready for her next project. The epistolary genre to which she now turned her attention had gained real momentum in Venice with the publication of Aretino’s letters in 1538, and the vogue for vernacular letter collections would continue well into the seventeenth century with those of Marino (1627), Arcangela Tarabotti (1650), GianFrancesco Loredano (1653; 1662),^[3] and others. Publishers were well aware of reader interest in epistolary collections and recognized the genre’s economic potential. Margaret Rosenthal notes that in the early stages, “Following market demand, publishers recycled the same names, while they began to print new epistolary authors from 1560 until the end of the century. They knew that they had an enormously profitable genre” (Honest Courtesan 122).^[4] Amadeo Quondam places the total number of letter collections published in Italy between 1538 and 1627 at close to 540 and adds that of these only 120 do not exhibit the name of Venice on their frontispiece or on their colophon (37). The gradual commercialization of the literary market in Venice might be said to reflect the general economic trends generated in Europe by the transition to an international market economy. The influence of the shifting economic system affected not only the general process of literary production and distribution—whose expansion was facilitated by the printed book’s displacement of the manuscipt—but also pervaded the very language of that literature. Philippe Desan, in considering the emergence of an economic discourse during the Renaissance, states that “La grande transformation épistémique de la seconde moitié du XVI˚ siècle est directement liée à l’impossibilité de penser le monde et l’homme en des termes qui ne seraient pas économiques” (Les Commerces de Montaigne 19). He argues that the new market sensibility finds its way into the images and metaphors of literary communication, claiming:

la généralisation du discours économique et son débordement dans la littérature réorganisent bientôt l’imaginaire à partir d’un modèle échangiste et marchand. . . . Une chose paraît déjà certaine: une conscience et un imaginaire économiques font leur apparition à la Renaissance. (Les Commerces de Montaigne 12)

Gradually, the imagination begins to be structured by an economic consciousness.

It is within this context of economic and discursive transition that I propose to examine Veronica Franco’s familiar letters. For not only does she participate, by their publication, in the fledgling conjunction of the worlds of literature and commerce, she uses the imagery of the economic transaction to formulate a literary environment in which to assert her autonomy as a writer and as a woman. The economic motifs of debt and the balanced distribution of “goods” (often metaphorical, but sometimes literal) are employed in Franco’s Lettere familiari to establish the writer’s honesty and moral superiority in the face of a Venetian satirical tradition that accused the courtesan of greed and weakness. More importantly, they are used to resolve the conflict inherent in the courtesan’s lot. Although her profession awarded her a degree of personal liberty not shared by the extremely sheltered Venetian noblewoman, and although she was in many cases free to manage her own capital,^[5] the courtesan was nevertheless inherently dependent in the most explicit of ways on a patriarchal system of exchange. While the “honest courtesan”—so known for her cultural refinement and social standing—could profit in some senses from that system, particularly in terms of economic and artistic license, she was at the same time an element of and subject to that system. Fiora Bassanese sums up this paradox noting, “More so than any lady, the courtesan had to please and appease the males who were concurrently her admirers, her subjects, and her source of income, status, and reputation” (295). Bassanese goes on to observe that the Italian courtesan used her literary gifts to her advantage: “her letters not only communicated but also cajoled . . . her verse was advertisement as well as art” (295). On a global level Desan has asserted that “La langue reflète toujours les choix idéologiques d’une époque” (L’Imaginaire économique 22). If this is so, as I believe it is, the relevance of a sytem of economic imagery to Franco’s public and literary self-fashioning cannot be incidental. As a courtesan, her role in society was defined in terms of the economic transaction and it is this imagery that Franco appropriates in her Lettere familiari to establish herself as an equal of her correspondents, and to illustrate that she owes no debts to the society that has produced her.

The clarity and precision of Franco’s economic discourse is immediately evident in the collection’s dedicatory letter and opening. The use of the book as a tool to create public alliances and to establish networks of patronage had reached a peak in the sixteenth century, when dedicatory letters and prefaces abounded as one of the few avenues by which writers might hope to actually profit from their work. Erasmus (among others) exploited the possibilities of the preface by dedicating the same work to several different figures; Franco takes advantage of this same public space not only by dedicating her volume to Cardinal Luigi D’Este, but by following that dedication with two sonnets and a letter addressed to Henry III of Valois, king of Poland and France. We can already discern in these opening segments the idea of debt as a central element in Franco’s thematics, particularly as it is closely linked to a wider concept of equilibrium, and to the value placed on writing itself. These issues of balance and (re)payment, explored as the writer attempts to “buy back” her moral merit while establishing her artistic worth, acquire in Franco’s hand a particular resonance even within traditional literary structures. To establish the proper deferential relationship between herself and the Cardinal, Franco attempts to demonstrate the “inadequacy” of her literary endeavor: to do so she resorts to economic imagery. In speaking of the epistolario, which she dedicates to Luigi, she sets up a parallel in which money figures centrally:

Sì come può ciascuna persona, quantunque posta in umilissima fortuna, rendere onore e gloria nei sacrifici e nei voti dell’Altissimo Iddio proporzionevolmente in concorrenza degli uomini più ricchi e più abondevoli di tutti i beni . . . così . . . non può fallire che non accetti più volontieri un minimo segno di devozione ch’un opra infinita. . . .^[6]

The comparison closes, of course, by referring to the gift that Franco offers to the cardinal: her book of letters, “minimo segno di devozione,” thus acquires an economic as well as an artistic value. In her study of the exchange of books as gifts in sixteenth-century France, Natalie Zemon Davis has considered the delicate and complex implications of gift-giving in general.^[7] She notes that the gift, which carries with it something of its giver, implies the expectation of reciprocity. The gift seems to function as a sort of insurance policy for alliances: or, as Marshall Sahlins sees it, as a “potentiality for benefits . . . which it would be immoral for the recipient to profit from at the others’ expense” (qtd. in Davis 70). The giving of books, then, implies a system of exchange, return, and balance, which Franco echoes in her efforts to construct a public image of autonomy. By presenting the cardinal (and, as we will see, several others) with the gift of her own work, Franco could have expected not only to promote her literary product and publicize her link to an important figure, but also to minimize her debt to the cardinal’s patronage while assuring his loyalty.

The obligatory declaration of literary inferiority, although somewhat standard for the time, acquires significance in Franco’s self-presentation for its gender-inflected nature. Hovering between modesty and assertiveness, Franco simultaneously valorizes and de-valorizes herself, saying she is a “donna inesperta delle discipline e povera d’invenzione e di lingua,”^[8] in the same phrase in which she explicitly puts herself in competition with “molti uomini famosi di dottrina.”^[9] That the writer fully intends to establish herself on equal ground is evident by the fact that she already has future literary projects in mind, more ambitious than this “poco libro.” She does not hesitate to muse about her literary capacities, which will increase with time and practice, while at the same time acknowledging her need for the cardinal’s patronage:

Forse che a tempo di maggior occasione e di più pros-pera fortuna e di più essercitato stile, ardirò con l’ai-uto della vostra divina umanità tentar impresa di mag-gior espressione dell’animo e dell’obbligo mio. . . .^[10]

With such declarations, Franco paves the way for a future of literary production by locating her writing within the context of obligation. The concept of debt and its repayment, we will find, appears almost as a secondary protagonist in Franco’s Lettere familiari.

The search for an equilibrium, inherent in the idea of creating balance through the payment of one’s debts, finds its reflection not only in the give-and-take of the epistolary form, but in the coherent and balanced organization of Franco’s collection, which will reach a dramatic peak near the middle of the volume. Franco’s letter to Henry III, which documents his visit to her in 1574, is placed immediately following the dedication, validating the writer’s social position and functioning as the book’s “official” opening. Of the collection’s fifty-two components, this first letter is one of only three in which the recipient is explicitly named. With this opening strategy Franco communicates two things to her readers: first, she immediately makes it clear that she will neither hide nor apologize for her profession, but, rather, exploit it for creative inspiration as well as personal and literary recognition. Secondly, she places herself in illustrious company by highlighting her relationship with royalty, aware that the king’s glory will not only redound to her in the eyes of her public, it will also authorize her writings. The two sonnets that follow celebrate this same meeting. In both, however, the writer holds tight to her identity: while she acknowledges the honor of the king’s visit to her, it is Franco who figures most prominently. The first sonnet closes by evoking the portrait of Franco that the king takes away with him: “Di ch’ei, di tant’affetto non incerto, / l’imagin mia di smalt’e di colore / prese al partir con grat’animo aperto” (I),^[11] while the second sonnet opens with the same image: “Prendi, re per virtù sommo e perfetto, / quel che la mano a porgerti si stende: / questo scolpito e colorato aspetto, / in cui ’l mio vivo e natural s’intende” (I).^[12] Franco has sold the king her likeness, but retains dominion over herself; she reconstructs her encounter with the king to her own advantage. In giving away her self-portrait, Franco exercises control over that portrait while asserting the capacity to create her own public image. The commercial transaction that has occurred between the courtesan and the client is rendered still more complex by the network of honor and obligation created by this particular visit. In her letter to Henry III, Franco reiterates that both parties have gained by the meeting: she by the honor of the king’s visit, he by the gift of her image. And although Franco liberally engages in the art of flattery, calling the transaction “cambio per me troppo aventuroso e felice” [“an exchange for me too fortunate”], the subtext is clearly that the slate has been cleared. Franco has established herself in an equilibrium with the king; she has beome his co-protagonist in these three compositions. With the gift of her portrait, and, implicitly, of her poetry, Franco weaves together the commerce of sex, art, and literature, and allows the principle of exchange to establish itself as the nullifier of debt and the restorer of equality.

In a letter written to a friend facing economic disaster, the concept of debt reappears on both the metaphorical and literal levels. Franco skillfully overturns the schema of patriarchal authority by offering advice to a male friend who has previously done the same for her. The recognition of the existence of a debt dating back to a prior and unspecified instance, and the desire to erase it, motivate Franco’s words and allow her to take on the mantle of authority:

E perché, in occasione che anco io, secondo l’uso del mondo, sono stata assai travagliata, v’ho trovato prontissimo a consolarmi con le vostre efficaci ragi-oni . . . non debbo mancar di far con voi questo me-desimo officio di consolarvi nelle vostre sciagure. . . . (IV)^[13]

Although Franco recognizes that the moral and literary support she now proposes is based on the exchange of virtue, she lays out the exchange in overtly economic terms, saying:

. . . fate conto che, nel pagarvi il mio debito, io venga a restituirvi quella propria moneta a punto che voi m’avete dato: tal è ricambio della virtù, che m’attegna non pur in similitudine, ma in forma d’un medesimo modo. (IV)^[14]

Not only does the moral support of a friend require restitution, but writing itself, envisioned in an explicitly monetary framework, becomes both an act that requires repayment and a means to repay.

In proposing herself as a literary equal in a patriarchal culture, Franco had to tread carefully. Like all women writers in the early modern period, Franco faced conflicting messages regarding her work, for the matter of the female voice was a vexed issue. As patriarchal society tended to prize female silence as an indicator of chastity, so it equated the female voice with promiscuity, at a time when, as Ann Jones has noted, humanist culture “celebrated eloquence in general as the distinguishing skill of male scholars, politicians, courtiers, and poets” (Currency of Eros 1). The patriarchal public was threatened by the autonomy represented by the emergence of the female voice, and perhaps in an attempt to circumvent such negative reaction Franco insists, for example, that she is able only to repropose what her friend has already said to her: “vi parlerò con le vostre parole e vi discorrerò col vostro stesso discorso.”^[15] She intends to reassure her correspondent that the knowledge she possesses derives from him, yet her discourse is necessarily different as a result of the fact that she, a woman, is proposing it. As Jones explains,

When a member of the sex systematically excluded from literary performance takes a dominant/hegemonic position toward an approved literary discourse, she is, in fact, destabilizing the gender system that prohibits her claim to public language. (Currency of Eros 4)

Thus Franco may acknowledge an intellectual debt she feels she has incurred in her own literary evolution, while at the same time demonstrating that she has repaid that debt and moved beyond it.

Not only is Franco’s discourse necessarily informed by her experience as a woman, it is colored also by her open desire to enter into competition with male literary society by appropriating its language in order to demonstrate her equality on male territory and in male terms. In this letter, Franco reworks rhetorical structures from a female standpoint. She creates a scale of fortune, in which she lists examples meant to convince her friend of his own good fortune in life, by establishing a series of positive/negative oppositions that increase in force. At the bottom of the scale her friend is lucky to have been born a man and not a beast; this is closely followed by his good fortune in having been born a man and not a woman. If Franco is, as she asserts, really only returning the counsel offered her by her friend, one has to wonder how he might have originally constructed this scale to console her. On this ladder of fortune gender is followed by an element Franco considers of still more importance—and in which she can participate—that is, citizenship. Here, again, Franco creates a foil to a patriarchal construct. The woman writer’s assertion of herself as citizen is an act of empowerment, for in professing her citizenship, she declares herself an equal member of her society and stakes her claim on the rights that accompany such a position. Morevover, Franco’s reworking of the civic element draws directly on the powerful, and female, roots of her native Venice. She establishes a parallel between herself and the city that is intended to vindicate her own dignity beyond the confines of the restrictive and often denigrating definition of the “courtesan.” Just as she offered her painted likeness to Henry III, Franco now offers her reader, in this description of Venice, her own self-portrait. The qualities she praises are chosen carefully. The Republic’s power and autonomy are emphasized, while at the same time the city is personified as a refined, untainted, and honest gentlewoman:

[città] non barbara, non serva, ma gentile, e non pur libera ma signora del mare e della più bella parte dell’Europa. Città veramente donzella immaculata e inviolata, senza macchia d’ingiustizia, e non mai offesa in se stessa da forza nemica per incendio di guerra né per combustion di mondo. . . . (IV)^[16]

The metaphor is well-executed: like Venice, the writer remains morally “immaculate” and “inviolate” regardless of the violence to which she has been subject over the course of her life. In associating herself with a Venice defined in terms of purity and sovereignty, Franco dissociates herself from the carnality of her profession and professes instead her intellectual valor. Rosenthal has observed how the identification of the writer with her city serves as further authorization for the act of writing, and finds a similar manipulation of civic myth in Franco’s Terze rime,^[17] Jones has also noted the importance of the civic motif in women’s writing and particularly with regard to the publication of their works.^[18] The exaltation of the city functions as a socially acceptable means in which a writer may talk about herself and assert her independence in a non-threatening metaphoric system. Franco, moreover, by identifying herself with Venice, is creating a link to a city that draws its power from commerce. The parallels she sketches acquire significance not only at the level of moral worth, but at that of economic capacity.

Money, in fact, wields even more power than citizenship in Franco’s vision of the levels of good fortune, and takes up the most space in her elaboration. Money has a central, practical importance for Franco, but she deftly protects herself from the stigma of greed by characterizing that importance as the necessary product of living in a money-corrupted society. She admonishes her friend:

Vi mancano forse le ricchezze? Guardate di quanto poco sia contenta la natura a conoscere quanto vi sopravanza. . . . E se non vi par d’aver tanto che basti all’usanza del mondo corrotto dal soverchio uso, considerate quanto meno potreste avere e quanto potreste star peggio. . . . (IV)^[19]

The resignation to one’s destiny, which Franco urges in these lines, is a topos that resonates with new meaning in the explicitly monetary context in which it is placed. For Franco, who was not supported by a family structure, economic security must have been a very real preoccupation. She depended primarily on her patrons and clients and knew that without their economic help she would be hard-pressed to support herself and her children. In this letter, as elsewhere, Franco’s dual rapport with money is evident: she rejects it as something that can lead to imbalance and excess, yet at the same time the recurrence of the economic metaphor in Franco’s work attests to the writer’s economic awareness.

Money was also a central element of the hostile and aggressive satirical tradition that the figure of the courtesan confronted in sixteenth-century Italy. Writers such as Pietro Aretino perpetuated negative stereotypes of the courtesan by targeting her much-derided “cupidity” and her lustful nature, and, where Domenico Venier offered literary advice to Franco, his nephew Maffio Venier attacked her quite viciously in his poetry.^[20] Franco responded to such hostility by taking advantage of the public space afforded her first by her Terze rime, then by her Lettere familiari, to refute these negative characterizations, emphasizing her own honesty while never hiding the fact of her profession. A key aspect of the economic imagery in Franco’s letters lies in the careful manner with which she portrays her relationship to money. As she is mindful in the fourth letter to avoid appearing fond of money for its own sake, so in several other letters Franco strikes a careful balance between economic autonomy and moral uprightness. The eighteenth letter of the collection, for example, seems designed primarily to illustrate the writer’s strong sense of (monetary) fairness and (moral) equality, by underscoring her determination to accept only that payment that is rightfully due her. Rather than embrace the gifts of a hopeful lover, Franco immediately establishes that she is emotionally and physically unavailable, further adding in her own defense that she could have easily handled the situation in a much less honorable manner, had she chosen to do so:

Poich’io non posso ricambiarvi con l’egual corrispondenza di quell’amore che voi fate professione di portarmi, avendo già collocato il mio pensiero altrove . . . vi sarò almeno grata e cortese nel cercar di gio-varvi col discoprimento di quella verità, la quale, mentre io, tacendola con mio beneficio, potrei celarla. . . .(XVIII)^[21]

The “verità” in question here concerns not only the writer’s unavailabilty but also the likelihood that the aspiring lover may not have understood that Franco is a courtesan. Franco, then, is rigorously honest. She is careful to clear away all her debts, and where she refers to her honesty and the lover’s affections as equal sums of silver and gold, it is certainly the influence of a market sensibility that structures her discourse:

. . . pretendo di pagarvi con la mia lealtà il debito dell’affezzione in quel modo a punto che s’io vi restituissi alcuna somma d’oro da voi prestatami con altrettanto argento o con altrettanta altra moneta equivalente.(XVIII)^[22]

By pointing out her own courtly manners and her honesty in financial affairs, Franco devotes herself in this letter to the refutation of the negative image of the greedy, lustful courtesan. She is offended by the message implicit in the attentions of her admirer, who by attempting to buy her love attributes to her the vice of avarice:

E con queste righe torno ad accertarvi della medesima disposizione dell’animo mio, al quale voi fate espresso torto con l’imputarmi d’avarizia, mentre credete con premii poter comprar l’amor mio, il quale, benché sia amor di donna che non concorre di richezze né di certe altre circostanze con un par vostro, non è però di vil femina che per convenuto prezzo obligasse alcuna parte del suo corpo, nonché tutto l’animo. . . . (XVIII)^[23]

Again resorting to the imagery of the market, Franco accuses her correspondent of increasing his offer “con accrescimento di prezzo, quasi facendo mercato” (XVIII),^[24] as if haggling over a strictly economic transaction. The letter then, or rather, the act of writing, becomes the means by which Franco exerts control over her role in a market environment and the instrument with which she cancels and repays her debts, assuring herself in this manner of her continuing independence. It allows her to vindicate her dignity in the face of the accusations levelled against her by Venetian society, and to reiterate the autonomy of her mind and soul, regardless of the control that she has been forced to give up over her body.

The 22nd letter of the collection, perhaps the most well-known, takes up the issue of control over one’s body, and one’s life, in a more direct manner. In a passionate response to a female friend who is considering bringing up her daughter as a courtesan, Franco attempts to dissuade the woman by describing in unembellished terms the life of the courtesan, and tries to save her correspondent from falling off this “hidden precipice.” She declares that if the mother pushes her daughter into this profession, it is not the daughter who will be at fault:

. . . s’ella diventasse femina del mondo, voi diventereste sua messaggiera col mondo e sareste da punir acerbamente, dove forse il fallo di lei sarebbe non del tutto incapace di scusa, fondata sopra le vostre colpe. (XXII)^[25]

Some critics have pointed to a sort of moral self-condemnation on Franco’s part in this letter, which functions as the emotional and socio-political fulcrum of the collection, and indeed have traditionally used it as evidence of a later religious conversion.^[26] Such an interpretation, however, constitutes a serious misreading. Franco deplores the paradoxical lot of the courtesan, and her initial lack of control over her destiny, rather than the courtesan herself. What she condemns in the letter, as Rosenthal has observed, is “the impossibility of freely choosing one’s future . . . her message is not repentance . . . but profound indignation” (The Honest Courtesan 127). The sharpness and realism with which Franco treats her subject cause this letter to stand out from the others in the collection, and give the reader the impression of having glimpsed the private interior of Franco’s normally tightly controlled public persona. Franco does not hold back her frustration, but takes her correspondent to task for having asked her advice only to ignore it. As she goes on to denounce the way in which her friend is forcing her daughter to dress, Franco’s reprimand underlines with brittle irony the objectification suffered by the courtesan as a pawn in the economic transaction. She exclaims:

. . . dove prima la facevate andar schietta d’abito e d’acconciamenti nella maniera che conviene ad onesta donzella . . . a un tratto l’avete messa sulle vanità del biondeggiarsi e del lisciarsi, e d’improvviso l’avete fatta comparer . . . con tutte quell’altre apparenze e con tutti quegli altri abbellimenti che s’usano di fare perché la mercanzia trovi concorrenza nello spedirsi. (XXII; emphasis mine)^[27]

The imagery Franco uses throughout this letter to refer to the courtesan’s life is mercantile, concentrating less on the idea of balance and debt than on the dynamics of the consumer-product relationship, and Franco will conclude that it is ultimately not the courtesan who wields the power in the economic transaction.

This letter holds a central position in the structure of the collection, and its unusual length attests to the particular significance it holds for the writer. Surrounded as it is on each side by more restrained compositions dealing with less volatile material, it serves as a focal point that adds to our sense of the book’s equilibrium. The economic element becomes concrete in this letter, in the form of the financial help that Franco offers to mother and daughter, and the economic imagery carries over to Franco’s condemnation of the courtesan’s life. In offering economic assistance, Franco is offering the possibility of choice; she is also offering to replace the uncertain revenue of the courtesan with the dowry of a respectable young woman, which will instead purchase a financially stable future. Franco reiterates that, despite the courtesan’s desire and potential for economic independence, her economic autonomy is perpetually unstable, as she constantly risks that “un solo un dì ti toglie quanto con molti in molto tempo hai acquistato” (XXII).^[28] This economic uncertainty combines with resentment at the loss of control over body and future, and the lack of say in that loss, to shape Franco’s stark description of the life of the courtesan:

Darsi in preda di tanti . . . mangiar con l’altrui bocca, dormir con gli occhi altrui, muoversi secondo l’altrui desiderio, correndo in manifesto naufragio sempre della facoltà e della vita. . . . Credete a me: tra tutte le sciagure mondane questa è l’estrema. . . . (XXII)^[29]

It is difficult not to imagine Franco’s thoughts turning to her own mother, as she warns this woman, “non sostenete che non pur le carni della misera vostra figliuola si squarcino e si vendano, ma d’esserne voi stessa il macellaio” (XXII).^[30] What Franco objects to most strongly is the denial of choice when a young woman is pushed into the courtesan’s profession. This initial powerlessness can only continue, for although the courtesan may exploit her ambiguous social role to reap greater economic, cultural and artistic freedom, she cannot escape her passive role as an element in an uncertain market system. She may exert her will to a certain extent, but she remains subject to the exchange system of which she is a part.

In the context of her struggle to achieve parity within this system of exchange, the literary artifact, symbol of Franco’s intellectual and moral equality, is frequently used to settle what the writer feels are her debts. The subtle implications of the exchange of books expand in Franco’s letters so that writing itself assumes a specific economic value. In letter V, Franco offers her work in exchange for the religious consolation given her by a friend in the Church, conscious of having “acquistato ricchissimo capitale” [“acquired priceless capital”] in her relationship with this person. In letter XIX she offers as proof of her devotion a collection of her sonnets (“una certa raccolta di sonetti da me fatta”). The epistolario itself is offered to Luigi D’Este with an implicit request for his patronage. Jones has noted that “In the commerce of sex, the courtesan’s body was for sale, but she spoke as well as being spoken for; her texts provided the symbolic capital that set the terms for any cash transaction” (Currency of Eros 10). Franco’s elaborate construction of a reciprocal system of obligation is an attempt to correct the powerlessness and passivity that underlie the courtesan’s profession. Franco’s discourse is clearly informed by the economic consciousness that resulted from the transformation of Renaissance Europe to a market economy, giving rise to the entry of economic language and organizational structure into literature. Her economic imagery, however, also emerges in reaction to a patriarchally-biased system that assigned worth to women as objects of exchange. In the Lettere familiari, Franco constructs from these factors a cohesive imagery of debt centering on the literary product as a unit of exchange. In her writing she replaces her body with her prose, and thus reasserts control over her public persona, her voice, and her identity.

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___. Terze rime e sonetti. 1575. Ed. Gilberto Beccari. Lanciano: Carabba, 1912.

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___. “The Self as Spectacle in Mary Wroth and Veronica Franco.” Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England. Ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1991. 135–53.

Quondam, Amadeo. Le carte messaggiere. Roma: Bulzoni, 1981.

Rosenthal, Margaret F. “A Courtesan’s Voice: Epistolary Self-Portraiture in Veronica Franco’s Terze rime.” Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature. Ed. Elizabeth C. Goldsmith. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1989. 3–24.

___. The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen
and Writer in Sixteenth-century Venice. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.

___. “Veronica Franco’s Terze rime: The Venetian Courtesan’s Defense.” Renaissance Quarterly 42.2 (1989): 227–57.

Schiavon, Alessandra. “Per la biografia di Veronica Franco. Nuovi documenti.” Atti dell’Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti 137 (1978–79): 243–56.

Zorzi, Alvise. Cortigiana veneziana: Veronica Franco e i suoi poeti 1546–1591. Milano: Camunia, 1986.

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^[1]Margaret Rosenthal draws an interesting parallel between Vannitelli and his denunciation of Franco for heresy, and Franco’s poetic detractors. See Rosenthal’s discussion of Franco’s enemies in The Honest Courtesan (153–203).

^[2]“. . . she has far too much support in this city, and enjoys the favor of many, who ought instead to despise her . . .” (all translations are my own). Vannitelli’s statement is contained in the Processi del Sant’Uffizi for 1580 (busta 46) at the Archivio di Stato in Venice. For an overview of the archival documents regarding Veronica Franco, such as birth, tax and death records, as well as proceedings from the Inquisition’s examination of her, Alessandra Schiavon’s article “Per la biografia di Veronica Franco. Nuovi documenti” is helpful.

^[3]According to Amadeo Quondam, volumes one and two of Loredano’s letters first appeared in 1653, while volume three came out nine years later in 1662: Quondam adds that Loredano’s was one of the most frequently printed letter collections of the period. See Quondam’s comments in his appendix to Le carte messaggiere (318).

^[4]While the vernacular epistolario enjoyed considerable success in the literary marketplace, prior to 1580 the collection of familiar letters was among its less common subgenres. Indeed, between 1568 and 1580 only three volumes of familiar letters were published in Venice, including Franco’s own. For a detailed discussion of the epistolary phenomenon in sixteenth-century Venice, see Quondam, Le carte messag-giere.

^[5]Rosenthal observes, for example, “Because the Venetian honest courtesan often lived outside the strictly defined marital relations that severely limited the economic and social freedoms of aristocratic women in Italy, she had, in theory at least, the opportunity to manage her own capital” (The Honest Courtesan 6).

^[6]“Just as each person, no matter how abject, is able to offer in their sacrifices and vows to Almighty God honor and glory which compete, in proportion, to those of the richest men of the greatest means . . . so . . . it must be that you accept more willingly a small token of devotion than an infinite offering . . .” (Dedication). I have taken all original citations from Benedetto Croce’s edition of the letters of Veronica Franco.

^[7]In “Beyond the Market,” Davis considers the significance of the exchange of books, taking into account its relation to a market system. She discusses at some length the function of the dedication and preface within this context.

^[8]“a woman inexpert in the disciplines and poor in invention and in language.”

^[9]“many famous men of learning.”

^[10]“Perhaps one day, for an even worthier occasion, with even more favorable fortune and a more practiced style, I will dare, with the help of your divine generosity, to attempt a greater expression of my spirit and my indebtedness . . .” (Dedication).

^[11]“And so he, assured of my great affection, / with gracious and open spirit, took with him as he left / my portrait done in colored enamel.”

^[12]“Take, most virtuous and perfect king, / that which this hand extends to offer you: / this sculpted and colored face / in which my living and natural one is understood.”

^[13]“And because, at a time when I too, as is the way of the world, found myself in a similarly difficult situation, I found you were more than ready to console me with your persuasive reasons . . . I must return this same service to you now by consoling you in your troubles.”

^[14]“. . . take into account that, in paying back my debt to you, I will return that very money you lent to me: such is the reward for virtue, that not only may [virtue] be mine as it yours, but [that I might use it] in exactly the same manner [as you].”

^[15]“I will speak to you with your very words and I will reason with you with your same reasoning.”

^[16]“. . . a city neither barbarous nor enslaved, but gracious, not only free, but mistress of the sea and of the most beautiful part of Europe. A truly maidenly city, immaculate and inviolate, free of the stain of injustice, and never herself harmed by enemy force through the outbreak and destruction of war. . . .”

^[17]See for example, Rosenthal’s chapter “Fashioning the Honest Courtesan” (The Honest Courtesan 58–111); Rosenthal briefly discusses the civic element in Franco’s verse in her article “Veronica Franco’s Terze rime: The Venetian Courtesan’s Defense.”

^[18]The author notes for example, “The rise of cities produced civic loyalties that were exploited by enterprising publishers, in Venice and Lyon . . . who advertised women’s texts as evidence of the cultural superiority of their towns” (The Currency of Eros 30).

^[19]“Perhaps you think you do not have enough money? See with how little nature contents herself and understand how much excess you have . . . and if it doesn’t seem that you have enough riches for this world, so corrupted by their overuse, consider how much less you might have had and how much worse off you might have been.”

^[20]Among Venier’s misogynistic attacks on Franco is the satirical sonnet entitled “Veronica, ver unica puttana.” For a discussion of the dialect poet Maffio Venier in relation to Veronica Franco, see Zorzi (93–111), and Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan (11–57 and elsewhere). Manlio Dazzi also offers an introduction to Venier’s verse, along with a brief biography.

^[21]“Since, having already committed my thoughts elsewhere, I cannot equally return the love you profess to feel for me . . . I will at least be gracious and courteous enough to try to help you, by revealing that truth which I might benefit from by keeping silent about, if I chose to hide it.”

^[22]“. . . I plan to repay with my loyalty the debt of affection I owe you, exactly as if I were to return to you a sum of gold which you had lent me, by giving you an equal sum of silver or of some other kind of money.”

^[23]“And with these lines I once again assure you of the unchanged decision of my mind, the mind which you wrong by attributing avarice to it, where you believe that, with gifts, you can buy my love. Although my love is that of a woman who cannot compare in wealth or in other circumstances with one such as you, it is not the love of a lowly woman who for the right price would sell any part of her body, not to mention her soul. . . .”

^[24]“. . . by raising [the price you offer], almost as if making a deal.”

^[25]“. . . if she were to become a woman of the world, you would become her messenger to the world and you would be worthy of bitter punishment, whereas her fault would not, perhaps, be completely inexcusable, founded as it would be on your errors.”

^[26]In “La lirica del Cinquecento,” for example, Croce maintained Franco’s “conversion,” and while he admitted that there was no real evidence to support such a claim, he argued that this was because Franco, in her last years, “rivolse a Dio le sue suppliche e preci, e risparmiò alla letteratura le rime del suo pentimento” (16). Croce, however, had based his claim largely on the sonnet Ite, pensier fallaci e vana speme, which he later demonstrated to be the work of the poet Veronica Gambara (see Croce’s introduction to the Lettere familiari).

^[27]“. . . whereas once you had [your daughter] dress simply and with little ornament, as befits an honest young woman, suddenly you introduced her to the vanities of lightening her hair and painting her face, and suddenly you sent her out in public with a totally different appearance, and with all those adornments one uses to help one’s merchandise find a market.”

^[28]“a single man, in a single day, take away from you what you acquired with many over a great deal of time”]

^[29]“To give yourself into the hands of so many . . . to eat with another’s mouth, sleep with the eyes of another, move according to another’s whim, rushing toward the shipwreck of your mind and your life. . . . Believe me: of all wordly disasters, this is the worst.”

^[30]“not only will you be forced to bear that your wretched daughter’s flesh be torn up and sold, but that you yourself will be the butcher.”