The Courtesans' Arts: Cross-cultural Perspectives Book

Courtesans, geishas, hetaerae, tawaif--these women have exchanged artistic graces, elevated conversation, and proffered sexual favors with male patrons in tea parlors, salons, and bedrooms throughout history and around the world. Not to be confused with prostitutes, courtesans traffic in intellectual and artistic pleasures in ways interdependent with their commerce in sex. For instance, in pre-colonial India, courtesans were meant to have a wide variety of skills, including magic, music, and chemistry. In Ming dynasty China, poetry and music were the main methods by which courtesans communicated with their patrons. Yet because these cultural practices have existed outside institutional norms and have been transmitted through non-traditional means, courtesans' arts have often vanished almost without trace. Exploring this hidden legacy, The Courtesan's Arts unveils the artistic practices and cultural production of courtesan cultures. Though hardly a universal phenomenon, courtesanship has recurred in places as varied as ancient Greece and modern-day India. Balancing theoretical and empirical research, this interdisciplinary collection, the first of its kind, explores courtesan cultures through different case studies--the Edo period and modern Japan, twentieth century Korea, Ming dynasty China, Hellenistic Greece, India past and present, and Renaissance Italy. Each essay reveals new perspectives on how the arts have figured in the courtesan's survival and demise. The Courtesan's Arts reveals that while courtesanship has recurred in numerous times and places, courtesans are universal neither as a phenomenon nor as a type. To the contrary, when courtesan cultures crop up, wide variations exist. What binds together courtesans and their arts in the present-day post-industrialized world of global commodities is their fragility. Courtesans, once vital to cultures of leisure and pleasure, are now largely forgotten or reduced to serving as prostitutes, national icons, or historical curiosities.