Paola De Santo
Hardback
February 2026 • ISBN 978-1-64453-416-8 • $125.00
Paperback
February 2026 • ISBN 978-1-64453-415-1 • $45.00
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Series
The Early Modern Exchange
The Ambassador and the Courtesan: The Body and the Body Politic in Renaissance Italy examines the formation of cultural subjects at the intersection of political and literary discourse. Drawing on literary and legal texts as well as archival materials, Paola De Santo offers a comparative analysis of two emerging roles in the early modern period and in Renaissance Italian society: the ambassador and the courtesan. While these two figures may appear unrelated, this original contribution demonstrates their shared relation to the body politic as well as insights into the transition towards modernity and early modern state formation in the Italian peninsula. One imagines the early modern ambassador as travelling in open space from one center of power to another, gathering news and disseminating it in writing, as well as negotiating in person with his words. The courtesan, in contrast, is imagined employing her body in the service of entertaining elite clients in the enclosed space of the urban ridotto, or salon. These characterizations reinforce their very different roles in Renaissance Italian society and culture, yet by placing them in dialogue, salient points of convergence emerge, particularly the place of their bodies in relation to the metaphor of the body politic. The examination of the ambassador and the courtesan allow De Santo to demonstrate how these figures, while excluded from the corporate metaphor, are nonetheless integral to the concurrent emergence of a modern subjectivity of the individual, and the formation of the modern state.
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