The Courtesan’s Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (review)

Courtesans—women who “engage in relatively exclusive exchanges of artistic graces, elevated conversation, and sexual favors with male patrons” (5)—sometimes occupy the time, attention, and research of Asian musical specialists. The Courtesan’s Arts is an edited volume exploring important aspects of the lives and the musical and social milieu of courtesans across both time and space. Though heavily weighted toward Italy and its famous courtesans, the breadth of coverage also includes China, Japan, Korea, and India. Fully half the articles, in fact, cover Asian topics, and the others serve to inform and offer breadth to the work as a whole. Editors Martha Feldman (University of Chicago) and Bonnie Gordon (SUNY-Stonybrook) combined the work of a graduate seminar, a conference, and individual contributions into a coherent and valuable book.

The Courtesan’s Arts begins with an impressive introduction. In addition to defining courtesans, it locates them within the context of stratified societies, confirms the variation of status and society in different times and places, and problematizes the issue of connecting musical production with sexuality. It also offers a preview of each of the articles, highlighting the different emphases of the authors and showing how each author’s perspective reflects a new facet of understanding a complicated subject. The book is divided into six parts, not entirely by area.

Part I, “Spectacle and Performance,” examines the presentation of self in ancient Greece, early modern Venice, and 17th-century China. Focusing on China, author Judith T. Zeitlin calls to the reader’s attention the overall context of the courtesan, with song as its primary artistic medium. She points out that scholarly efforts to highlight the poetic gifts of the courtesans have led to the diminishment of scholarly focus on musical skills. The author also includes the relationship of 17th-century song to local opera performance practice, composition, authorship, and song transmission. It is an elegantly organized article that offers not just a summative account of courtesan life, but also an introduction to aspects of that particular era in Chinese history.

Part II, “A Case Study: The Courtesan’s Voice in Early Modern Italy,” while not linked to Asia, is nonetheless useful in its focus on the voice and the music specific to a particular type of female Italian performer. Part III, “Power, Gender, and the Body,” links precolonial Indian courtesans with those of 16th and 17th century Italy, and ancient Greece. In her beautifully illustrated work on precolonial India, Doris M. Srinivasan emphasizes the distinction between the courtesans of the royalty—as keepers of tradition and culture—and married women as keepers of the family lineage. These “two options for power” (161) served to separate women; Srinivasan digs below the surface of (primarily male) writing to explore the complicated blend of the hypersexualization of a female archetype with the exaltation of tradition.

Part IV, “Excursus: Geisha Dialogues,” offers contrasting ideas on the role and status of the geisha across time. Lesley Downer asserts that the enduring identity of the geisha has always been primarily as an artist, and points out that the concept of “courtesan” is fraught with hierarchical divisions in a Japanese context. She also notes the differences between geisha and courtesan in terms of societal attitudes, clothing, training, and patron access to sexual favors. Miho Matsugu connects geisha of various levels more closely to a sexualized identity in Japanese history, and discusses the generalized shift in the geisha’s status toward symbolization, as the women come to literally embody traditional Japan.

Part V, “Fantasies of the Courtesan,” includes as one of its two articles a more direct focus on Edo Japan. Timon Screech highlights the water-based transition from the “real world” of men and their wives to the “floating world” of the Yoshiwara—the pleasure district. Including a map, illustrations, and poetry, Screech offers an intriguing glimpse of the necessary (and fantasy-laden) transition from one state of...