Description: Drawing on literature, legal texts, and archival materials from the Italian Renaissance, The Ambassador and the Courtesan offers an analysis of these cultural subjects, and demonstrates how placing these apparently unrelated figures into dialogue sheds light on early modern subjectivity, state formation, and the transition toward modernity.
Review Quotes: 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)" (6/17/2025 12:00:00 AM)