Introduction

Abstract

Abstract This volume is an attempt to understand the courtesan and her arts by creating a dialogue about different courtesan cultures. Though hardly a universal phenomenon, courtesanship has recurred in specific times and places, from precolonial India and ancient Greece to imperial China, Renaissance Italy, and Edo Japan. Invariably courtesans have been accompanied by a repertory of rhetorical, gestural, sonic, and visual idioms that complement their sensual power. The essays that follow explore the conditions that have allowed courtesan cultures to evolve and thrive, or caused them to perish. Intimately tied to these conditions are the courtesan’s arts. In each case, the factors that motivate, sustain, and destroy courtesan cultures prove to be intimately bound up with the status of courtesans as bearers of artistic traditions and the ways the arts are pressed into service as shapers of culture. Whether drawn in Lucian’s mock salacious tones or instructed by the inventories of the Kamasutra, courtesans have been obscure objects of desire who have fascinated their observers, past and present. Indeed, throughout the world they have tended to go by a common cache of epithets: ambiguous and furtive, veiled but showy, performative, and meretricious. They are gracious and deferential, yet mobile in status and sometimes even in class.