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J 4 Introduction

churchman, Marc^ntonio della Torre, in praise of his country estate. Two groups of poems tell a story that spans both sections of the collection. A trio of Francos poems (3, 17, 20) deals with jealousy and separation in terms clearly drawn from Roman elegy. And two poems crucial to her de-fense of herself and of women in generał against a małe attacker begin in the first section (13) and continue into the second (16).

The story of the collection is always the story of Franco as a poet. The pair of poems with which she opens the collection emphasize her famę as a writer, exceptional among Venetian women and among courtesans as a literary “star." In Capiłolo 1, Marco Venier presents himself as the tradi-tional woeful Petrarchan lover, displaying a “pale / and mournful look” in his “solitary wandering" (49-50), and he praises the features that Petrarch had celebrated in Laura: bright eyes, golden hair, a white hand. But Venier also refers directly to Franco as a poet: her lovely hand holds a pen. He ac-knowledges her inspiration by Apollo, who “breathes his benign knowl-edge into you" (72); he encourages her to go on composing “graceful and pleasant rhymes” (77 ); and he praises her for writing in the spirit of the an-cients (85-86). These compliments are part of an argument of seduction through which he links his praise of her poetry to his request that she sat-isfy his desire: “Let Venus be no less pleased by your beauty; / you must put to good use the many gifts she bestowed upon you” (152-55). In Franco s response, she follows his logie, wittily assuring him that the skills she has learned from Venus will make him find her “dearer still” (51). But she proposes a bargain to him in which she insists on intellectual collabo-ration as a precondition for erotic fulfillment. Rather than simply demand “silver or ... gold" as proof of his love, she asks repeatedly for “deeds" (28, 37, 181-82), and to describe these deeds, she uses a word, oprę, that means literary works (181). When she tells him that what she really values are ac-tions that prove a mans “virtues” (which in the Venier group meant intellectual skill) and his “wisdom” (106, 108), she is using the same vocabulary in which she describes her enthusiasm for “the academies of talented men" (Letter 17). Rejecting Marco Venier s compliments as “fictions” (40), she invites him, we believe, into an exchange of written texts that she can use as proof of a relationship extending beyond the private sexual liaison of courtesan and client. Her publication of his poem as the first in her book confirms this conjecture. Franco admits and celebrates the sexual prowess with which she can reward Venier: critics have been astonished and de-lighted by the frankness with which she speaks of her expertise in “the de-lights of love" (149-50). What we see as new, in addition to this courtesan s openly erotic rejection of the high-minded poses of Petrarchan poetry, is her insistence that her lover interact with her as an intellectual, complying with her demand for proof of their literary connection.

Francos interest in presenting herself as a serious participant in intellectual life comes through clearly again in an exchange with a man whose