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6 lntroduction

frankness justifies her in challenging the literary poses adopted by małe poets who repeat the idealizing cliches of Petrarchan poetry: its praises of a reserved, unattainable woman, rarely represented as speaking in her own voice. The public literary self Franco created by offering alternatives to masculine discourse is most fully and dramatically staged in Capitolo 16, in which she defends herself against insults penned by Maffio Venier, a nephew of Domenico Venier. The literary context of this duel gave Franco a rhetorical power of which she took fuli advantage: her mock-military challenge to Maffio s authority and her triumphant dismissal of his capac-ities as poet and decency as a man were morę possible in the pages of a poetic collection than they could have been in the everyday interactions between a courtesan and her morę socially powerful clients.

Francos Familiar Letters likewise use literary form to shape a repre-sentation of the courtesan s life for a public audience. The letters have bi-ographical value; they show her in a variety of daily activities—playing musie, sitting for a portrait, organizing a dinner party (Letters 9, 21, 13), even asking for the loan of a wheelchair after a domestic accident (44). She writes as a mother on two occasions, congratulating a noblewoman on the birth of her son (16) and apologizing for not writing to a friend because her own sons have been sick with smallpox (39). The letters also comment on events and situations represented in the poems, so that reading the two to-gether is highly informative. But at the same time, these letters inform us about Franco s public literary activities and the image she wished to proj-ect. She sends her poems to a writer she admires, probably Domenico Ve-nier, to request help in revising them (6, 41, 49), as many małe writers of the period also did. In letters to a fellow Venetian and to the painter Tin-toretto (17,21), she declares her enthusiasm for the intellectual discussions that occur in ^uthe academies of talented men.” And her longer, most pol-ished letters show her writing as an exemplary moralist, giving advice to a patrician małe friend (4,17) and to a woman friend who is thinking of mak-ing her daughter into a courtesan (22). In this way, as in her poems, Franco adopts a position of public authority that calls attention to her education, her rhetorical skill, and the solidarity she feels with women.

SOURCES

Franco shaped her poetry and prose in response to the literary experimen-tation in which the writers of the Venier ridotto (salon) were engaged. One of their great interests was the recovery and analysis of medieval vernacu-lar poetry, which had been morę or less banished in Piętro Bembo s influ-ential treatise, Essays on the Common Language (1525). Bembo had praised the Petrarchan sonnet as a model verse form and recommended a digni-fied, emotionally restrained style based on ancient Roman rhetoric and the